Client: Humulo Engineering
Team: Nick Dutka, Bruno Cebollada Fernandes, Erick Leclerc & Ben Westergreen
My Role: UX/UI Design, Unity Development, Lighting, Environment Artist & Optimization
Platform: Developed with Quest 2, designed for Pico
Pre-Trip Inspections are a crucial safety precaution for all Commercial Truck Drivers. The training is procedure based and difficult to practice for drivers without a truck. Humulo Engineering was looking to explore the training experience to add to their repertoire of industrial VR training.
Humulos previous work used a combination of techniques to give users feedback on how to progress through a training experience. Their instructional UI was in screen space and attached to the users gaze.
My goal was to simplify these systems, and update the design language to a more immersive experience.
Flows were mapped out based on the previous research and contextualized spatially around the truck. User research showed that a simple route around the vehicle would be easier to memorize for drivers.
Visualizing UI in a spatial context with our subject matter was too complex for traditional wireframes. I combined storyboarding and the wireframe process to sketch UI states and layouts.
This is the first prototype of the UI. Animation was added to the tooltip to draw user attention. Goals for this prototype were scale, legibility in VR and aesthetic with the truck and highlight materials.
I wrote a script for our UI to follow the user’s gaze in world space. It has a threshold hold so the user can naturally look around the text without it moving. This prototype was also an iteration for a UI feedback system when visually inspecting truck components.
The tooltips needed to be dynamically sized based on the distance from the user and their angle. I created logic to automatically adjust their size and rotation. This allowed for non-designers on our team to create teaching steps easily.
The environment I designed was intended to recreate the most common time that a pre-inspection would be done, at dawn. This presented an opportunity to improve immersion and focusing the users attention by dimming the environment and creating spotlights with the street lamps.
Baking the lights with The Bakery provided huge performance boosts for running on device (Quest 2). Fog, leaves (particle FX), skybox and a skylight added ambience.
I created the scenes for the first two lessons: Safety Precautions and Exterior Cab. These established the UX and teaching style for the rest of the experience. Haptics and audio feedback were added to the UI.
Since our experience had a emphasis on physical interaction I updated the UI to be direct touch instead of raycasters. This sped up user interactions and increased immersion with a simpler fidelity contract.
