![]() The work to introduce scripting and interactivity was handled in a similar fashion. After around nine months, the decision was made to share the internal tool with the general public, so Microsoft Maquette shipped through the Microsoft Store and Steam in October 2018, and through the Oculus Store in July 2020. With that, the team added, refined, and fully realized features as it learned from feedback and as the customers requested. This leads to a product that might not have some “basic” features – like a layout system or easy alignment at first – but only has features that are actually used and needed. ![]() This all happens while designers, programmers, and technical artists sit in the same room or are constantly connected through chat applications. The team decides which feature will have the biggest impact – design- or business-wise – and implements that, ships it to the customer, listens to feedback, and repeats. The development process itself is also different from most products: It happens in a so-called cabal setting with no management structure and no formal roadmap of the final product. A very rudimentary version was available after around three months of work, and since then, the development of the tool has been done by using Maquette itself (kind of like a C-compiler written in C).ĭevelopment of Maquette started in early 2017 after realizing that a simple tool was available for VR and AR. A small team at Microsoft started the inception of the tool, and the first goal was to have a feature set rich enough so that the development of Maquette could be driven by using Maquette itself. Framer is a more modern version of such a tool for 2D.ĭevelopment of Maquette started in early 2017 after realizing that no such simple tool is available for the VR and AR context. ![]() Historically, tools like Visual Basic or HyperCard were used to this purpose. Usually designers use mockup tools to create an impression of a UX experience, and then try to judge whether these mockups should come to life. One of the biggest challenges is to know whether a given experience is viable and fun to use and also that it solves a given problem. Also, the user interface is usually co-located with the actual experience – which leads to lots of interesting interaction problems.Įven though there have been VR and AR headsets available in academics since Douglas Engelbart built the first prototypes in the 1960s, they only became available recently to the masses after the availability of high-resolution displays from mobile phones, new inventions in tracking technology, and access to the power of high-end graphics cards. The biggest challenge with AR and VR applications is the addition of the third dimension to their experience. The intention of Maquette is to help AR and VR developers conceive and refine their concepts and help find the next AR and VR killer application faster without the need to fully implement it first. ![]() With it, it's possible to iterate early on a UX and learn whether the application is actually useful and fun to use. Maquette allows creation of a spatial prototype in a context that can be presented in the medium that the experiences are built for. After the developer invests significant time to implement the design, there are often realizations that the design is faulty now that it's been translated into the VR/AR environment. After getting funding, the designer teams up with a developer, who has to make a serious investment in time and programming to create the experience – often in tools like Unity or Unreal. With VR and AR and the addition of the third dimension, these mockups have the potential to deceive the customer in the viability of a product. Usually a designer creates a mockup in a 2D tool like Photoshop and other UX design tools and then presents it with PowerPoint on a traditional 2D screen. The target users for Maquette are mainly designers or developers, people who're looking for a fast way to evaluate their ideas in AR and VR without actually building them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. We'll also explain how you can tweak it by using scripting at runtime. We briefly talked about this tool in a previous CODE Magazine article (see ) But here we're going to formally introduce it and explain how to get started with it. This tool is still evolving and is currently in beta. It's a spatial prototyping tool aimed to help users to mock-up virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences very fast. In this article, we're going to talk about Microsoft Maquette (see ).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |