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NetEase EZXR

Bring AR experience to Pigpa Restaurant

The project brings AR commercial experiences to the Pigpa Restaurant to let people know about the healthy pork provider - NetEase Weiyang Pig Farm. The challenge was to combine existing UX methods with contextual parameters (lighting, sound, voice) to merge digital and physical AR experiences for diners in the restaurant. 

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As lead UX designer, I worked with machine learning engineers and product mangers to design the experience. I worked on the model making and animation process and the product shipped in August 2017 and had estimated more than 20,000 users.

TEAM

Calvin Qiu, W. Li and Y. Zhuang

PROJECT TYPE

Professional, NetEase Technology

MY ROLE

UX Design, Content Strategist, Product

Management, Machine Learning

TIME

2017

About Weiyang Pig Farm

Analyzing the unique qualities of the pig farm helped us to utilize AR to market the pork produced by the farm:

  • Pig Shed: Improve black pigs’ immunity by applying double steeple ceiling of 20-degree angle that prevents ultraviolet waves coming in and keeps the room temperature stable in the same time

  • Food: Special liquid food made of corns, soybeans and agricultural by-products

  • Music: Various music is played all day long to help black pigs relax and create for them a fun living environment

  • Excrement Collection: By studying animal behaviors, people can guide pigs to eat, sleep and excrete in different places and hence easily collect excrement on fixed locations

Defining Core Design Principles

  • Extrapolate features of the pig farm

  • Design moves for each character

  • Promote Human-Augmented Reality interaction

Extrapolate Features of the Pig Farm

By research, the black pigs are clean, relaxed and have high quality of life, therefore, we want people to experience different types and personalities of pigs with three scenes: Fresh Piglet, Happy Piglet and Dancing Piglet. when the user opens the app, they get one random personality of pig out of the three scenes.

Fresh

Dancing

Happy

Design Moves for Each Character

Moves of the three characters were then designed to see how they could be organized and fit into real-world scenarios, including a bathroom scene, a beach and palm tree, as well as a dancing scene with a stage.

Flowchart.png

Solution: Promote Human-AR Interaction

We reduced the barriers to entry for people without prior AR experiences by designing an accessible interactive system through merging smartphones, physical environments and AR embodied agents. By observing how people interact with AR agents while hold smartphones, the team had combined UX methods with multiple sensory modalities (visual, audio and haptic) and context design parameters (ambient light and room color) to implement usability and efficiency of use for human-AR interactions.

1. Fresh Piglet

In the fresh pig scene, bath tiles are added to implement the atmosphere of the showering and water effects are applied onto the screen to make the scene look more real. 

2. Dancing Piglet

A gift box was designed at the beginning of the scene to roll off the detected plane texture and let user to tap to open, creating mysterious engaging atmosphere.

3. Happy Piglet

Besides the 1 in 3 choices of the three piglets at the beginning, the happy piglet itself consists of three scenarios and user can easily switch to other scenarios by tapping the function button 

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