concept and architecture
Nostalgia Glasses is a smart pair of glasses that allows the user to relive memories through an augmented reality display. The goal and motivation of this concept is to enhance the user’s connection to physical place, social identity, and personal identity through the re-experiencing of meaningful, context sensitive, location-based memories. In our formative study, we conducted a diary study and two cultural probes to help us to understand how our users experience and value memories and places. We then conducted a series of user enactments to understand the potential limits and boundaries in terms of automation and privacy for our design. Based on our findings from our formative study, we designed Nostalgia Glasses to:
- Encourage positive emotional responses in people
- Emphasize the places and memories related to important people, such as friends and family.
- Use a combination of “triggers” (visual, time, and location) to initiate memory experience.
- Ensure that the context is appropriate to show a memory, such as when users are engaged in simple activities and are alone.
- Enable user control over what memories are captured, stored, and shared.
- Notify the user of an experience and allow them to opt in/out of a memory experience.
- Enhance connection to place, self, and others.
- Be private, personal, and positive.
- Not disrupt, annoy, or distract users.
- On device storage of image and video memories as well as the option to upload the data to the cloud.
- A always on camera to record the memories (with the option to turn it off for privacy).
- Sensors to track location (GPS) and affective context (HRV and skin conductance) while the memory is recording to determine if it is meaningful and positive.
- Sensors that track the user’s current affective, situational, and location context to determine if a memory experience is appropriate (gaze detection, HRV, skin conductance, and accelerometer).
- An augmented reality display to view the memories.
- A stylish and discreet form factor.
Goals for the demo:
We created a video demo focusing on the core experience of reliving the memory. In the video we tried to demo the context sensing elements, the UI notification and user gesture control, and the types of memory content we would enable in a real world scenario. We did not fully replicate the original memory capturing to the video (we will flesh this aspect of the system out more fully in the final video).
THe Demo
We created a video demo using a video camera, a pair of glasses, After Effects, and Illustrator.
Script:
Script:
- In our script, we first will lead by introducing the purpose of the system and the key features.
- We then will show the video demo and one of us will wear the glasses and act as if we are controlling the UI on the screen.
- In the video, there is a scene where the user is walking down a street near a bookstore in Downtown Ann Arbor.
- The user stops and stares at the building.
- The system senses the user’s context.
- The system then notifies the user that a memory will occur and the user can use gestures to continue or end the experience.
- Then, the user will see a memory of a time when she was talking to her close friend in front of the same bookstore one year ago.
- Finally the user will use a gesture to end the video, again indicating user control. Next, we will go through each aspect of the video demo by feature to explain what is happening in the scene.
Glass interface
Since we are still refining the UI, our demo does not fully reflect the fidelity of interactions we hope to achieve in our final video prototype, but by making the demo we gained the insight of how to design the final UI notification system in a bubble format. Bubble format can display several different memories and is associated with a metaphor that memories pop in one's mind.