Newtons Park
The Project
zSpace 3D brings immersive and intuitive learning to schools across the country. Students became engaged when the real world merged with the virtual world. All students from grades K-12 learned Newtons 3 laws from basic to advanced physics.
While students can set up and run experiments on different gravitational fields, record their experiments and review. Teachers can set up activities equipped with questions, answer fields, hints, the ability to allow students to take screenshots and attach them to the assignments and much more. Newtons Park comes with an inventory of objects such as: ramps, balls, targets, friction materials, and force applicators.
My Role
While working closely with the product and software teams, I was responsible for the full visual design of the Newtons Park application. This included everything from the environment to the UI design/look & feel, layout and Icons. The project took approximately a year to design and ship.
Technical Challenges
Ghosting, high contrasting colors, eye strain and discomfort, frame rate, latency issues and interactive UI were the most common problems we had to design for pretty much anything on the zSpace system.
The Process
Originally, Newtons Park was going to have an indoor skate park look and feel. Ramps and balls were going to be the main items in the user's inventory to run experiments with. Although this was visually appealing, it presented some technical challenges with the field of view. We quickly learned we could not show full scale environments due to severe eye strain and discomfort. The larger the scene was and the further back the user had the ability to look into the scene the more unbearable it was to look at the screen.
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Alright, so we think we know it all now...Wrong. Since the Newtons Park app was one of three apps in our STEM bundle, all apps needed visual consistency. We created mood board to understand what kind of look and feel we wanted to represent. In the end this meant, a very clean and sterile environment in space with a hint of the "Star Trek" look. The idea was having the upper level of the ship dedicated to our Franklin's Lab app and the lower level dedicated to Newtons Park experiments. Although the users could not run both apps at the same time or simultaneously jump from the lower level to the upper level, we did accomplish a consistent aesthetic appearance. This particular look and feel however presented its own technical challenges. Since the environment was sterile and utilized lots of light gray, the inventory objects had severe ghosting issues, due to high contrasting colors against the background. After many iterations and lots of back & forth with the product team, this concept just didn't work out the way we had planned.
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Third time's the charm! So we scrapped the spaceship and as a team decided to go with a more realistic look and feel. This allowed us to have more freedom and cater to our respective app features. For example; in Newtons Park users can jump to different gravitational fields, so why not literally change the environment to represent the gravity change? There were five different gravity value's students could explore: Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter and 0 Gravity (Space). The "Ship" was now a fixed-size floating platform that users could pitch and yaw to get a full 360° view of their experiments.
The Process...Part 2 (Remastered)
Fast forward about 6 months after shipping the app, and it was time to remaster it! After receiving thorough feedback from students and teachers we had a lot of work to do. The entire UI was stripped and re-designed to be more efficient, not only from a technical perspective but from a users perspective as well. As much as product leads wanted the inventory objects to be in scene it was killing our frame rate and just not intuitive. So going back to the original design, the inventory objects were now a part of the UI and not the environment. The entire UI was redesigned to be more user friendly and icons were remastered specifically for students. The environment visuals were also updated. Backgrounds were refreshed and the floating platform was simplified greatly. The over all poly count and texture sizes were significantly reduced. Some new useful features were added... Ladies and Gentlemen, Newtons Park 2.0 was reborn and ready to make Newtons 3 Laws much more fun to learn and easy to understand!
Newtons Park 2.0 Screenshot
Original Newtons Park Screenshots
