Meta Reality Labs
Gesture and multi-modal input prototypes for mixed-reality communication.
- Year
- 2022
- Role
- Product Design Prototyper Intern, Input Explorations
- Tags
- Multi-modalEMGAR/VRUIUX design
Hands, gaze, and voice as the interface for mixed reality.
As a Product Design Prototyper Intern on the Input Explorations team, I worked on the input layer that lets people use mixed reality without a controller. The team's research covered gestures, eye tracking, speech, and touchpads, alone and in combination, and how each one changes what interacting with MR feels like.
Hands, gaze, and voice as the interface for mixed reality.
As a Product Design Prototyper Intern on the Input Explorations team, I worked on the input layer that lets people use mixed reality without a controller. The team's research covered gestures, eye tracking, speech, and touchpads, alone and in combination, and how each one changes what interacting with MR feels like.
My focus was gesture for communication: the moments when someone in MR wants to respond to another person, not move an object. The real question was how a gesture carries social intent. Presence, emphasis, pointing, acknowledgement.
The prototypes centered on one use case: two people in mixed reality talking, pointing, and reacting the way they would across a table. Each one tested a guess about which input felt easy and which felt like work. The iterations came from watching real people try to reach each other through the headset.
These prototypes were selected for the Meta Connect 2022 showcase, where the team's input research was presented as one direction for the next computing platform. Getting them from internal studies onto a public stage was the part of the internship I cared about most: making exploratory research legible to an audience in a few seconds.
