Virtual History was designed over eight weeks as part of MCAD’s User Experience Design Systems and Prototyping Concepts course. During this time, we focused on building a design system, prototyping, and user testing.

Creating VR and AR projects has lead me to take an interest in UX and how these technologies can be made more accessible and less initmidating to users through the way we encounter and interact with them.
I designed Virtual history as an educational app that allows users to interact with historical sites, objects and monuments that have been re-created as AR animated pieces in the geographical locations they once existed.
I created this app with two problems in mind:

• Making historical information educational and entertaining in a digital/interactive format.

• Making XR accessible and easy to use for all consumers.

With one of they key focuses of this project being accessibility, I wanted to ensure colors, fonts and buttons fitted the criteria for some levels of visual impairment and created a design system withn this in mind.

Initial questions and early testing indicated that buttons, their active and inactive states, closed captions and instruction boxes needed multiple options to be designed for further testing, while keeping as much screen space free as possible for camera interaction.

Next steps:

• Continue testing to solidify a design for the buttons, investigating whether its possible to condense the settings, recording, CC and resfresh buttions into an expanding format like a hamburger menu.

• Test again with confirmation dialogue messages added after ‘refresh’ and ‘video record’ button are selected.

• Testing with a wider pool of users spanning a range of interaction abilities to ensure the design is as inclusive and accessible as possible.