Project Xenon is about exploring the possibilities that technology will provide us in the next 10 to 20 years. Our mission is to foresee how we will use new devices with augmented reality, quadcopters and wall displays for interpersonal communication.

As part of the brainstorming of possible future technologies, I helped to prototype and create a cube-based user interface, which can be used in augmented reality glasses using gestures. Two stages of paper prototyping were used, once using flat transparencies, and the second time using 3D cubes. We envisioned how in future, with augmented reality, we can interact with these cubes as a form of user interface. The cube metaphor affords the user to turn it around the 6 faces and hence potentially offers 6 different menu options for each cube. This allows it to be highly flexible, and it is also an easy object for users to manipulate, given that most users played with blocks in their childhood. The UI design is also hugely inspired by the Microsoft “Metro” design principles. The final product of the design is featured in the short film below at 01m:30s.

In this film, I was the film editor, compositor and user interface designer. The film was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, composited in After Effects and Nuke, and color-corrected by another teammate in DaVinci Resolve. User interface was designed with various paper prototyping stages as described above.