One thing I love about working with Jayway is that if you have a genuine interest it is always easy to gather a bunch of colleges/friends and start creating. This will be a three-part series about how we got creative around augmented reality (yep, it’s still in the title). So now it’s time for part two: show time, getting the creative discussions going.
Augment your life with HoloLens I – idea and planning
Augment your life with HoloLens II – showtime
Augment your life with HoloLens III – filtering
Leading creative discussions
Candlelight and PowerPoint
On game day we gathered six of the finest brains at Jayway, with me as the game show host. I like to start out cozy with some lit candles and some refreshments before I fire up the old projector with a PowerPoint to go through the background. As any good discussion we need to start up with some challenges and opportunities, but most important – we need some objectives. And since we are disciplined bunch, we have all read up on the family and trends. Time to jump in and start generating the first ideas.
Association game
Word association is fun and is great to get some energy into a group. Start off by throwing up a word and then build an association chain of words. When you have enough, add a problem description and randomly select one word to use as an idea seed. Then let’s see what the crowd can come up with. An open question like combining AR gaming with monasteries and slushy worked quite good. Some of the crazier ideas that came up was:
- HoloFreezer – Augmented countdown to brain freeze
- HoloMood – Mood following scenery changer / theme your day
- HoloSpy – Hidden secret messages
Trend tree
Focused, starting by selecting a trend creating ideas around myself and near future, extend to the family, how can we build and extend those ideas, move evenfurther out, work, school move further out in the future and continue to the community society. This was a more focused work 2 in each team, time to think and reflect and develop ideas. Here we came up with more reality based and sane ideas and a bit more developed, a few examples are:
- HoloWunderbaum – make my car appear nice or maybe prettify my garden (for others to see)
- HoloThanksgiving, now you can be at home but have thanksgiving with both friends and family – at the same time
- HoloSchumacher – driving to work as Schumacher might not be safe, but a lot of fun
Lotus flower
I love this method; I think the strict structure appeals to me. For a single question or problem there need to be exactly eight different views. For each of these views eight ideas should be created to tackle it. This structure puts a bit more pressure on participants, it also forces more preparations on you as facilitator; Questions must be open enough and the views must differentiate enough to induce new insights. Too closed or similar views and you will run out of ideas, too diverse and eight will not be enough to cover all ideas. So what did we get out of this stuff?
- HoloPerformance – have an augmented karaoke or simulate a big audience
- HoloBBQ helper – heat zone finder, meat status analysis (add that miniature thermal controller to each of the steaks )
- HoloWorkout – compete with yourself, augmented pace keeper
By now you have realized that any idea we come up with must contain the magic Holo word.
Cookies and coffee
So now, go get some HoloCookies and next up will be the last part of this series: Filtering and starting the concept work.