Special Thanks to
Sally Chung, Host of Hackathon and my Portfolio Class Professor
Faculty: Laina Leckie | BFA Design & Advertising Chair: Gail Anderson
Judges: Snow Yunxue Fu, Anthony Koithra, Danilo Makio Saito
Photographer: Lam Tran, AJ Zapanta
#Designpreneurs Hackathon #School Of Visual Arts #SVA BFA Design
Key Learning
3D Skill Set
Managing a new 3D skill set is definitely one of my biggest takeaway in this Hackathon. I’ve tried building 3D models before, but I never made any animation or tried any crazy textures. This competition gave me a chance to dig deeper into the 3D realm, and explore ways to combine 3D and graphic designs. Although the animation and the models are simple, me and my teammates were still happy and proud of our final outcomes, and opened up a door to a brand new world for me.
Time Management
How to separate workload and manage the workflow is a great challenge for us. We are mostly used to working a project in several weeks and process each step in a relatively long period, but this time, we need to speed everything up and still ensure our quality. We had to keep an eye on the clock during our working process, and chose a project manager to make sure everyone is on the same page and remind everyone what we should do next. I played the project manager role for couple hours, and experienced how does it feel like to jump back and forth in different working space and organize everything together.
Be Flexible and Open-Minded
My final key takeaway is the ability to always be flexible and open-minded. Since we were working a heavy project in very limited time, we had to keep abandoning thoughts that are too broad so we could have more time polish what we had. At first we had the idea of storytelling a scene where a father experienced her daughter’s wedding in VR in his last moment. I really liked this idea and which it could end up in our pitching video as a strong emotional part. But when we were pushing the project, we started to realize we didn’t have enough time for that, so we had to put this idea aside. I later convinced myself to accept that this idea wasn’t the best fit in our current workflow, and turned to focus on our current storytelling flows. Also, facing the unknown 3D and many other skills, we all tried to connect them with the software we learned before, and built the bridge between clear and unclear, which saved a lot of time studying in a brand new realm.
Timeline
Me, Tia, and Jaeyoung were new to Hackathon, so it’s a tough challenge for us to build a project in such rush and short time period. We met a lot of difficulties but also learned a lot about teamwork and develop new skill sets. Here’s the detailed timeline of our competition day:
October 4th, Friday, 2PM: Group gather, Kickoff and Challenge announcement meeting
Challenge option 1 is to design an immersive experience for elderly individuals in 2030. This address issues such as loneliness, fosters a sense of community, or promotes mental and physical well-being. We need to find a solution that leverage immersive technologies appropriately and also keep its accessibility to the elders. Challenge option 2 is to create an immersive solution to re-imagine vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity and efficiency for NYC in 2030, which includes areas such as traffic signal coordination, emergency alerts, autonomous parking/driving, or traffic flow management, and the solution should consider user safety.
In the meeting hall
Me finding seats in the hall
October 4th, Friday, 3-6PM: Discuss prompt with teammates and come up with initial ideas
We all thought both prompt have potentials, so we spend the first two hours researching and discussing any ideas we have about the theme. We listened each other’s opinions and gave feedback and agreements to the ones we loved the msot. We then realized we have more interesting and achievable ideas over the first challenge options, so we gathered our concepts and came up with some questions we wanted to ask our mentors.
Idea brainstrom
October 4th, Friday, 6-6:20PM: Have a zoom meeting with our mentor Meijie Hu
She listened our concepts over the first prompt very carefully and thought the memory gallery concept can be interesting. In this idea, we are trying to build a digital space where elders can store their memory, create spatial memory video with AI, share and watch memory video with their family. Also, we imagined that it can be touching if we can allow users to experience those never-achieved wish in their last moment. I described a scene where a father was at his last moment, but with the VR device, he can experience his daughter’s future wedding and fulfill his final regret. Our mentor thought the storytelling part can be attractive and gave us some advice to keep pushing on that direction.
October 4-5th, Friday-Saturday, 6:20PM-10:30AM: Keep working on designing the app and our pitching presentation
We grabbed a quick dinner together and started our long run. We decided to research more about our concept first, built out our persona and analyzed our competitors. When doing those pre-design steps, we got to learn more about what problems were we targeting, and keep shrinking down and simplify our solutions. We were mainly targeting on helping elderly preserving and sharing their memories with a headset device carrying an AI assistant which help built an immersive MR experience. We hope this reminiscence therapy can help unlock long-term memories and provide emotional comfort for old people.
Research and analysis
After we settled down with our concept, we worked in different directions to push our project in different realms: Me and Tia were working together on the App’s interior design, which includes UI, UX and assets building, while Jaeyoung and Eunju worked on finalized the content and visuals for the pitching presentation, and building XR mockups, animations, and pitching video with AE.
Video story board and UI design sketches
AI generated story board, app icon, and product AI image
We were all specialized in different software, but none of us are that familiar with 3D. So I took up the role and tried my best to figure out how Spline works. It took me couple hours to study what each feature can do and find tutorials to see how to create the assets I want. I realized that Spline can build geometric shapes and applied complex textures easily, but I still lack the ability to create more complex organic shapes in there. So I turned to build those shapes in Illustrator, since I had experiences doing 3D models inside Ai, and I knew I could export obj files from that.
Model created in Illustrator
Based on Tia’s design suggestions, I later created models for several assets in Ai, and exported the obj files and played with their color and texture in Spline. I also tried to do some spinning, shape-changing, and position changing animation in Spline to help make those assets popup more in the mockup.
rendered in Spline
Animation effect
AI assistant's animation
We then imported those 3D animations into our Figma file and combined them into a delicate mockup.
AI assistant's animation
October 5h, Saturday, 10:30AM - 1:00 PM: Break time before the final pitching
After working overnight, we were all exhausted, but still feel confident and proud of how much content we built in such a short time period. We wanted to ensure we could have the best performance on the stage, so we went back home and rest a little bit. Then at 1PM, we headed back to school to pick up some free pizza, and started to practice for our final pitch.
Free pizza and drinks
October 5h, Saturday, 1:00PM - 3:00 PM: Practice for the final pitch.
In order to make sure we’ll round up our presentation on time, we wrote down our own parts, printed them out, and rehearse for several times.
Discussing how to present
Presentation line sheet
October 5h, Saturday, 3:00PM - 5:00 PM: Final pitching presentation and Winner Announcement
Our group was probably one the last four teams in the list, so we still had some time to get more familiar with our lines and listened to other team’s pitch. Everyone did a fantastic job! When it’s our term, I was so nervous in front of a hall of people and judges, but I still managed to gave my speech fluently and we nailed our presentation on time!
Before and during our presentation
We were all very excited how far we’ve been though in just 25 hours and how amazing our work was. We didn’t win a prize at the end, but we were all very satisfied with everything we’ve learned and built a much deeper friendship.
Group photo and my certificant
Role Separation
Avery Yuanqi Zhang
3D Model and animation building with Spline, Logo design
Eunju Jun
Final pitching video editing with AE, AE animation effects
Tia Liu
UI interface with Figma, research
Jaeyoung Lee
Story board generation with Chat GPT, Presentation layout
design with Figma
