From Hack to Product Feature – How to Leverage R&D at Work Through Hackathons | Accessibility VR Meetup Recap

ROLAND DUBOIS: Thank you, Thomas. Thank you, everyone, for joining me today. I'm really excited to talk about the way I operate and think outside of the box in my daytoday job as a lead product UX designer. Tom already gave a little bit of an intro about me.

I'm going to quickly skip through this. I am not only a tech speaker, but also I'm actually holding workshops in New York City. I hold events and bring the immersive technology of the web to anyone who is interested in learning. I'm always interested to experiment in immersive technologies to bring the VR industry into an accessible state so it can be used by everyone.

Today, this is our agenda. I'm going to talk to you guys about design and design maturity. I will talk specifically about the facility management industry. That's the vertical in which I've been working in the last year, and also I'll talk about ideas that fit the product roadmap and how to drive your ideas into the product roadmap.

A quick question to the crowd. Can you show me with some kind of emoticon if you work in the design area? Anyone? Okay, one.

A couple. Who is working in a startup? Waving hands, a smiley face. Design in startups, as we know, these are the growing pains because the startups are scrappy and messy.

Obviously, there's very little time and energy to actually experiment beyond the product roadmap. And the focus of the startup is to focus on product market fit. Sales team is usually the driver of decisions that come into the roadmap, and design is basically trying to keep up with the agile development process of the teams, the engineering teams. More often than you would imagine accessibility is deprioritized because of design cost and tech cost.

The code I actually received� eventually, when the startup takes off, it is just the cost of doing business. Obviously, it is not optimal, but it is a reality that we can actually tackle. I want to talk about design and UX maturity. If that's something you are familiar with, it might be repetitive here, but I think a lot of people don't really know about that.

It's a scale to measure the business relationship with design, specifically with user experience. It's actually a scale to measure the maturity of the design company. It doesn't increase overnight. It takes many years, and it happens in small steps.

Education of design is a part of the designer's job in a product company. Jared Spool explains the design maturity in five stages. We have the dark ages, which is when you're starting from scratch. There's a team hustling to figure out what is needed in order to bring a product to market.

There's not much room or no room to actually figure out user experience design aspects. The next level is spot UX design where you have one superpowered UX designer that takes on all the UX projects. You still have the silo of the engineering team, the silo of the QA team. Basically, you're doing user experience on demand as a oneman army in that environment.

The next level would be to build out a UX design team. That's a UX pool of people that have specialties in UI and UX and research. They will be handed out to different teams that work on different projects or stacks in different squads. There's still UX design as a service.

It's not well integrated. It is still designers and then the rest. If we want to look at companies that are on those levels, I can talk about the embedded UX. You definitely know software companies that have pods that are built out of a design and engineering and product squad.

That is embedded UX because user experience of the design is part of the think tank of the crossfunctional team. Spotify, Wayfair, that use that embedded UX example. It is the job of the designer to advocate across every person at the company. Over years, you grow into this infused UX design stage.

No matter where you are in your journey at your company right now there's a huge opportunity to go from that oneman army superman job UX position and leverage the time you spend on design to bring in more attendance and more focus on design workshopping and facilitation ideation sessions. There's a lot of opportunity here to build yourself a voice and accelerate the growth of the startup into a UX design as a service stage.

And also to experiment, right? As a lead UX designer or any person that is spearheading a design at a company, there is design options called design ops. We all know DevOps probably, but DesignOps. We have to build out a design process and pipeline.

It is how you bring design into the development and time it so that it stays on top of the engineering backlog. You build features from small versions and strengthen them into new versions. You build viable products and then build on the features. As a designer, you always keep a focus on UX accessibility.

That's the visual part, where we talk about color, contrast, readability. User research is a part of DesignOps and getting into a feedback loop with actually customers. Then there's strategic planning down the road. None of this is new to you, but I want to talk to you about the actual vertical I've been working in, the facility management.

I'll take you on a journey where you can get a little bit of insight into what is facility management and what are the struggles and challenges that customers my company is catering to are facing every day. I worked on the east coast of the U.S. with several different companies, but I'm going to give you an example of a university clinic in Germany that is called LMU�Klinikum. You see on the left a giant building.

It is nicknamed the toaster because of the toaster shape. It is one of the largest complexes in Europe. It has 10,000 people and staff. Why am I talking about this building?

Because I worked there for 14 months in that building. I was running operations as a helper on a station for sick children. I was running around going from all the layers of the buildings and catering to all the different needs from running a station to getting into the repair rooms and catching a medication for sick children, like in the pharmacy tract of that building. On the righthand side, you see just the size of this building.

The hallways are a mile long. They're actually called streets. If you think of this complex as an ecosystem, the people that are visiting and the people who are sick, the patients, are two different customers that go through this complex, and they're seeing a certain layer. What they don't see is actually what is behind the scenes.

Here's an example of all the different kind of aspects that make it possible to run a building ecosystem like this. There's airconditioning, HVAC, ventilation systems. Hospitals in the U.S. and New York, especially, they have their own separate power plants.

If sandy happens� like superstorm Sandy and the power goes out, they have their own power plants. If you see in a hospital a power cord with a red color on it, you can plug in your iPhone if the city goes dark. They have fire escape routes and elevators that run if there's a fire in the building. They have intensive care units and a lot of things that are just to be maintained, but also they have new things that come up.

They have construction. They have power outages and fires even in this building. There's a lot that goes on, and you don't see it as a patient and you don't see it as a visitor. The people are working around the clock to make sure everything is working fine and people don't get sick of the rooms being too cold or too hot.

There's a lot of responsibility there. Let's talk about the user personas that we worked on and defining the facility management workers. There's a very interesting hierarchy. Again, I'm referring here in the U.S. kind of way.

I'm not 100% sure if it is vastly different in Germany, but I'm using the German building as a reference because of NDAs and all this other stuff. We have a director level, a manager, a supervisor, a worker specialist, and a dispatcher. It is not 100% representative of the age group and the gender and the ethnicity of the people. These images are from schools to advertise for the job.

The fact is the age group is 35 to 65. It's an ageing workforce. They're all union workers, which is interesting when you try to conduct user research because there's a lot of limitations. A lot of them are veterans, which is also a very important factor to consider when you're catering to people that might have some disabilities of some kind.

Just purely because of their previous engagements. Maybe they were stationed in dangerous areas and got hurt. Then most of them have engineering degrees. The resources are always very limited.

The ecosystem consists of many different things, like airflow, security, lighting, energy, controllers, sensors, like heat, airflow, humidity. You think about these building complexes. They not only have living quarters, like beds for units. They also have operation rooms.

An operation room, like an ER, emergency room, they have a very specific threshold of temperature that is allowed to be in that room by law. If the temperature drops underneath that threshold or above that threshold, that room is shut off and cannot be used. And not using that room will cost the hospital $50,000 a day. There's direct cost connected to the fact if the balance is off, it costs a lot of money.

There's a lot of responsibility on these people. Now, what's the tools they use? What's their job? You see a person with a clipboard and a person with a lot of screens.

I'll talk about the many screens in a bit. These are the tools. There's building automation systems and building management systems. You can clearly see the interfaces and the visuals that people use in these very important positions.

They're cluttered. There's an absolute cognitive overload. There's very little to zero color accessibility that can be seen on these screens. They try to show dimensional visuals in a threedimensional isometric way, but it is very flat when it is rendered.

There's very little inspecting around it. It's not really a good execution either. On the upside, this is keyboard accessible. Why is it keyboard accessible?

Because of the software that's underlying. The reason why this looks like this� you would ask yourself who is the designer that designs this. The fact is in my research I found out that it's not actually designers who designed this. It's actually engineers.

It is part of the contracting company that gets the job to install the mechanical engineering HVAC systems on a floor or a construction job. One of those specialists then goes and learns to plug and play pieces from the manufacturers and creates that screen. A person plugs and plays together a screen that he or she thinks would be the most helpful, the most reasonable to see if there's issues with that specific system.

There's one system. You can imagine handling units in that gigantic building. You can imagine you won't be able to digest all of that information on one screen. There is just too much data.

It's not really targeted. If there is something going wrong, it's not very likely you're going to catch it, so the result is there's a bunch of pain points that come through. The facility management team is actually working more reactive than proactively. That means they're actually waiting for a phone call where someone complains there's something wrong in that room instead of seeing it on the screen because they're physically unable to see it.

Budgets are tight. Resources are limited. Every single time there's a new budget negotiation and a new construction contract that goes out, the first place where people save money is on the maintenance, and that is directly impacting these workers. It's almost impossible to measure the quality or improve the kind of work that they do.

The context you see on this screen doesn't really provide you additional information or meaningful context. Therefore, you can't do deep digging into what the root causes of problems are. You see a bunch of pain points here. Obviously, in the company, as a designer, we have a lot of opportunities to explore.

Displaying alarms in a concise and contextualized way is one of these opportunities in tracking quality of work and presenting clear and accessible interfaces. It was traditionally 2D, that visualization. That is one thing that is on the roadmap and was on the roadmap. It's been part of the company's goals.

I saw opportunities for bringing in some 3D and XR, some spatial visualization. That definitely was not yet on the product roadmap. My question was, where is the problem located? We're talking about an ecosystem as a building.

I want to see alarm data in a spatial context. Maybe it is related to other things. What is the context, the root cause of the problem? You're going to see alarms or sensors going off in one room and another room.

I realized it is the neighboring room that has faulty sensors. The resources and the workforce. Where's the person when there's a problem any time? The engineering shops are on a lower floor.

If you think about a building with 20 flights� there's three flights below the ground as well. There's the engineering tract and then there's the disposal tract. There's more on the ground than meets the eye. I had the privilege to see it because I was running around, doing chores for the station.

Those facility management workers are located on the lower levels in dark�rooms that don't have daylight. It's quite interesting what they go through from an emotional level. I do have a deep empathy for them and also understand that there's definitely room for improvement. My point was how can we measure improvement resource management and how can we calculate how fast a worker can get to it and how long it takes for them to fix it?

Give them something to succeed and set them up for success. That was my little deep dive into facility management. I showcased a few opportunities. Now I have to crystallize the ideas that specifically don't fit the roadmap.

My hypothesis was visualizing alarm data in its spatial context improves the speed and quality of problem assessment and resolution. My challenge was keeping the app interface, keyboard accessible, screen readable, and progressively enhancing the spatialization of the data from 2D to 3D and then XR and AR/VR. I built this out in four different points to achieve that structure to build by going through these stages. First, I need to create an ideal user story.

My idea was how would it be if we had the tools� the right tools. I need to visualize that as the user story. Then I list out the user pain points, the things that bridge between the ideal and the real. Then I abstract those ideas and generalize the statement.

Then I share the goals and build a minimum viable product. Can you give me a bit of an emoticon so can I see if you're all still with me? One, two. Cool.

There's a lot of information here, and I want to be mindful because there's a lot to digest. In this user story, I have a dispatcher, which is in one part of the building, getting a call from a nurse in another part of the building that the operation room has a high temperature. The dispatcher then looks at a screen and sees the alarm data from a sensor in the room and the other rooms on that floor that have similar signs.

With that information, the dispatcher can extract the fact there's actually an issue with the chiller on the roof. The dispatcher creates a work order, attaches the alarm data and the issue to that work order, and then the dispatcher looks for a specialist to fix that chiller issue. The specialist is in his shop on the lower levels, and he receives that work order. When it is sent out, it calculates an ETA of about 25 minutes for time to arrival for the worker on the roof to fix that chiller.

When the chiller is fixed on the roof by the worker, the worker will then sign off on the work order and the dispatcher gets a notification and can go back on the platform and sees in the 3D visualization that the temperature has normalized in the rooms that had a problem. So, that's the user story. Now I'm going to list out the pain points. First is, where is the problem located?

How do I find the problem? What systems are connected or close to that problem? And where is the worker located to solve that problem? I categorize those as data quality problems because we're relying on the alarm data for the context.

We can extract that context in some ways, but that is definitely a problem. We can't make that data up. It has to be there. Location and alarms would be figured out.

The next thing is how long will it take the worker to get there and when is the problem solved. That is a math problem. We definitely can do that. That has nothing to do with outside sources, just us figuring out the math problem.

These are business logistical problems. How can the software that we have create 3D models without needing external resources? How is this a scalable deviceindependent solution that can easily be maintained? And how can this be accessible with screen readers and keyboards and assistive technology?

I listed out the pain points. Now I have to extract them. I have data quality problems, math problems, and logistical problems. I can sum them up basically in an abstraction that we have.

We have locations, the static objects, and then we have people, the moving objects. Then we have to attach rich data to those objects. A work is suited for a certain job. That is metadata that is attached to a certain object.

That is basically data quality. Then the math problem is calculating the distance between the objects and the time between them, so the ETA. Then also figuring out the indoor navigation and the travel path. That's also a math problem.

The logistical problem is summed up in opensource code stacks and converting 2D�SVG and canvas drawings. Make it threedimensional content that can be used by the facility management workers. My generalization in this case is to take a step back. I know we talked about facility management, but I want to go little bit more umbrella on that situation.

My statement is governmentfunded institutions aren't able to showcase their buildings in a threedimensional interactive way because there's no fallback for assistive technology. Why do I think or know that is a fact? Because there's very strict ADA compliance guidelines. If an institution doesn't comply to ADA guidelines, they get defunded.

That's actually a problem. Section 508 and 503 talks about people using technology if they have disabilities of any kind. It is very important to make this an inclusive experience that is empowering every one of every kind of background. At the moment, there's no standards for accessibility in 3D and XR experiences, which is currently being worked on at the XR Access Initiative symposium that is next week.

There's none at the moment. That's why institutions are a little bit shy of adopting anything new too fast. The other thing I see is the current solutions just seem sufficient. I don't want to put MIT on the spot here, but this is just an example I picked.

This is the MIT campus accessibility map. It's a PDF. It is an accessible PDF. You don't really need to zoom in, but you can already understand it is not an optimal navigational solution.

It's not very pleasant as a user experience. There is still room for improvement. Just to give people the power to navigate maps better with accessibility features. Then I want to share the goal.

The fourth part is to share the goal. As a user, I want to be able to navigate buildings with any device in any dimension. As a user, I want to know where to go and how long it will take me to get there. After the abstraction, I see two main goals for the user.

Then the challenge is obviously the devices. I want to make sure it works on mobile, tablet, VR headsets, AR glasses. Think of a linear experience, 2D experience, flat screens, 3D on touch displays and then going into the XR space with mobile AR or HMD and glasses. Now that I have set up goals and my abstractions, now I need to find a hackathon that makes it possible for me to build what I am envisioning.

When you find your hackathon, you have a lot of opportunities. On the one hand, you want to make sure the event has enough time and support for you and your team to realize your MVP. You can look to industryspecific events, like the AEC hackathon that's going on. That starts this weekend.

It is about building engineering construction� it is very specific. They're embracing XR at the moment. AT&T and TMobile are obviously focused on streaming and data and communication. XR�Edu challenge is a hackathon that focuses on education.

There's the MIT Reality Hack, the NYU Abu Dhabi hackathon. I don't need to go through all of them, but consider the length of the event as well. The SXSW hackathon is just 24 hours. You really have to solve some hard questions and hard ideas.

The idea is to pick a hackathon that gives you ample time to dig deep. Check out who is attending. Most hackathons that have been around for a little while, they have photos. You can see who the people are.

You want to make sure it is inclusive. You want to sure there's a lot of different diverse people there, all different age groups, all different backgrounds. Very important to see if they're driving toward accessibility. In my case, accessibility was the whole reason why I wanted to build that.

What is the mission of the event? Usually, hackathons have missions for their events. You can see what kind of awards and prizes are being given out. You can see does my concept or my idea fit in any kind of category that could win me a prize because why not.

You're there to build something. You want to make sure you can realize it. Why not be rewarded for it on top of the interest in building it? You can browse hackathons on Devpost.

Let's talk about the actual hackathon I did. I hack and build opensource software. In January 2020 of this year� I can't believe it is already 2020. It was at the MIT Reality Hack in Boston at the MIT media lab.

You see there's about 500 hackers. It is a gigantic effect. It is one of the largest XR hackathons in the world, I believe. And they're doing a really good job in making sure they have a broad range of hardware devices.

In the bottom left, you have an image of the different devices for hackers to play with and experiment with. In the top center, you see these crowds in the middle of this forum. They're putting papers on those pillars to write up the ideas that they have and gather into groups to create teams. On the top right, you see my hackathon description was very sparse because I was thinking more of a technological challenge instead of creating a game or anything else.

I set up WebXR. I was very scarce, but it opened a lot of discussion. People were interested and wanted to learn more. I could give them a lot of reasons why they would want to join my team.

In the middle on the bottom, you see the team that I have. They're two very talented� one is an UX designer and the other is an AR designer, who was very, very helpful and made this project a success. I'm German, so I love compound names, but I wanted to have the title of my hackathon project to be distinctive about what it actually does. It is progressively enhanced indoor navigation in WebXR.

We wanted to create a scalable ecosystem, which means we have to think about the generation of the 3D space and then the navigation of the 3D space. It's two sides of the coin. Low entry barrier, opensource code, device independence, and webbased framework, and userrelevant metadata inside the building. You can see the sketches we did in our little corner in our hack area.

At the bottom, you see a wire flow where a person without 3D knowledge can create buildings. Here's a screenshot of my cell phone where I have a text overlaying a 3D visualization, which basically was an MVP to prototype and test. Can we nest data in text form and then navigate parallel to that? We can have it read out with a screen reader software.

The 3D visualization of the building works in parallel. We always use browser accessibility from the ground up instead of having to retrofit accessibility into a 3D ecosystem. We use the power of already existing assistive technology to use the browser to visualize that. That's on my cell phone.

Obviously, on the desktop, the same thing. Once we reach the floor level, we have a grid system that helps us to navigate. I'm going to talk about that grid system in a little bit. On the bottom right, you see a screenshot of the HoloLens tube we built.

We needed to find that technology into the AR space. Let me see if I can show you the quick video of how this looks moving. That's where the test comes in with our technology here. I can actually drag and drop and navigate with the keyboard parallel with the text, hover over areas and click into them and work parallel with rich content and text while at the same time navigating 3D structures.

This is the MIT media lab campus. This little blue room is the room where we actually were hacking. I put that relationship in there because it is an institution. It's an educational institution, so I thought that would be a good example.

Then you see the elevator shaft in green. We want navigation to go toward the elevator and then down. Then we go into the grid model where you see dots. The person position is a blue dot.

Then we can navigate from a bird'seye view also and then the inperson view. You can switch to the room view and navigate into the area where the elevator is. Now we reach the elevator. There's a quick screen grab of the hollow lens.

Yeah, this is actually anchoring the whole lens position. Then you see the overview grid on top of the room. Then you see a calculation of a pathfinder here. The blue dot is where you have to go in order to exit that room and then navigate to the elevator.

I don't think it goes all the way to the elevator. I'm not really sure with the video right now. No. That's the concept.

There were a lot of challenges with indoor navigation. One challenge was the imprecision in directions. These are general challenges. Indoor navigation is not a new problem to be solved.

There's been a lot of problems down the line. A lot of people tried to use mapping software or a screen grab in order to capture the size of the room. It is just very imprecise. Navigation always happens towards unknown areas.

There's lack of visibility and occlusion. The conditions in the environment change also. There could be an elevator out of order. There could be a room under construction or just restricted to people who don't have the authority to go those places.

It's always a nimble and changing place. The definition of indoor boundaries done manually is very time consuming, and it is a very big challenge to figure out the orientation of the actual user and position of the person who is going from A to B. The solution that we had found is indoor navigation can be done with a spatial grid. You can actually flood a room floor with a dot pattern and then take out dots where the person is not allowed to go.

Let's say I'm a wheelchair bound person. I need to go to a different floor, to a different room. It would just make the staircase not navigational. The map that calculates my pattern to go would just ignore stairs because with a wheelchair I'm bound to elevators.

That's a use case. We're using in the indoor guidance system for users. The designer has a background in game development. He refers to a grid pathfinding framework for that.

This is the first stack we used for this hackathon. We used WebXR and Azure and Vuforia and Unity. It works also with assistive technologies. The most important part of going to a hackathon� and I want to repeat this again� is you have to user test your project with other hackers.

There's a reason you did all the research to get there. There's a reason why you spent your time going there, because you saw the potential with users. This is your option to feel out if it is working or not. Test your project.

During the hacking time, it is not really easy. There's always people floating around that are interested in what you're building, but mostly hackers. There's a showandtell. There's a place and time where you can showcase what you're working on.

Even though you might be really exhausted, this is the perfect place to gather as much feedback as possible to bring your project to the next level and make it really good. Now that we arrived at the end of the hackathon, now we have to revert back and make a case at work. The first thing is I share my hackathon project in a lunchandlearn. That's me talking about the design process and hackathons at work.

I showcase what user pain points my project solves. That means I showcase the umbrella version, the generalized version. It's not really related to the company directly, but it solves definitely issues that are known. Then I readapt the hackathon project to the initial product feature afterwards.

I create task flows, wireframes, and clickable prototype. With that, I'm ready to have it put on the product roadmap as a real feasible product. Here is the task flow and the wireframe. I adapted the hackathon to a product at the company.

Then I built out a prototype on the comp here. There is the looking glass holographic touch display, which showcases threedimensional data in a holographic glass box. It is really interesting because you can see from different angles where the information is. I thought that would be a powerful visualization tool.

On the righthand side, you can see how the 3D visualization is being implemented in the current application on the desktop. In order to wrap this up quickly, I want to do a quick recap. I know it was a lot of information, and thank you for staying with me and being concentrated. I did talk about design and design maturity and understanding where you are and leveraging what you can do and where you can improve.

The knowledge and acceptance of design across a company. I talked about the facility management. There was a vertical that needed help in design, and I was humbled to be part of the solution there. The ideas that don't fit, how to define the ideas, how to define your MVP.

Find a hackathon, build that MVP, and then convert it back to what your work needs in order to give the company something that's proven on a technical and general way that then ends up in the roadmap. This slide is an ending slide. I have a bunch of projects I do. I definitely teach accessibility and VR/XR at hackathons and also mentor and have meetups.

If you're interested in learning more about virtual reality and augmented reality, you can sign up at that meetup and it is always free. I'm happy to showcase your product and help you build prototypes in immersive web. Here's a slide to get in touch with me and resources of things I talked about. Thomas, this is basically it.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. I'm excited to have you all here and listen to how my journeys are going with product features that don't fit the roadmap and I make them work with hackathons. Thanks.

THOMAS LOGAN: Thank you very much, Roland. That was a great presentation. I'll echo that I've been to your Aframe New York City meetup. It's really cool.

I think most of our people are remote here, but I think a lot of the resources you've made for that� that was my first AR project I did, when you built the scanning code or showed how to use the little cards to get an AR popup.

ROLAND DUBOIS: I actually do them on Zoom because of COVID 1. I'm going to line up the next oneonone soon. If you sign up now, you can be part of the first� we had a little break, but I'll bring it back and it will be remote. It will be online.

That's the plan.

THOMAS LOGAN: Oh, great. I'm going to paste a link to your meetup in the chat. That's something that helps. We can put links there.

If you have questions for Roland, you can type them into the chat or unmute your microphone and ask them. While we're waiting, Roland, one question I had was�

ROLAND DUBOIS: Please go ahead.

MATT COOL: Thanks, Roland, for the presentation. I am definitely going to be checking out your Aframe. I've had recent lidar stuff of mapping physical locations. I've been really into this (echoing).

I love this bringing the real world and converting it into a VR case. What's your take on all the emerging technologies?

ROLAND DUBOIS: And that's a good question. Unpaid lidar is in the infancy stage. Hackathons are usually there to give people a chance to try out the newest and shiniest and the best of things. Since the iPad is the only device that has the lidar right now, it is a specific device that doesn't fall in the category device independence.

I'm much more focused on computer vision, surface recognition that is based on simply a ground for background, middle ground, and foreground technology. Those can be found in telescope libraries that understand surfaces. By using streaming services, you can make a use case. If you are lucky enough to work at a company that can define what kind of device is being used, then you can go for those kind of technologies that are cutting edge.

If you are building for educational facilities or research facilities that have a broad range of people with all different kind of wallets that maybe can't afford the latest technology, just think about the gap between the telephones we have right now and the telephones that people are still using. I know people that are using iPhone 5s still. There's a huge technology gap between the iPhone 12 that's going to come out and the iPhone 5.

You can build proofs of concept with latest technology lidar and all the fancy stuff that's coming out right now, but you have to find ways to bring it down to a reasonable experience for people who don't have that technology in order to make a feasible feature down the line. Like I said, unless you can dictate what device is being used by your users, it's not going to be a broadly used experience.

I think one of the reasons why Amazon is featuring the AR realizations� in 2007, it was very much undercover. I know how many people here know Amazon has products you can put in AR on your phone and on the floor. That's not a hugely promoted feature. It's a test stage more or less.

It's not something that all devices can do. That's my point about that. If your customer is in that space, go for it. Perfect.

If not, you have to find ways to make it still a good experience for anyone that does not have that specific hardware.

MATT COOL: Thank you.

ROLAND DUBOIS: Any other questions, please?

THOMAS LOGAN: I wanted to ask about the video demo you were doing for the wayfinding. Even though you're tired, the best audiences like to test with the hackathon participants. How many people were you able to try that out with at the hackathon?

ROLAND DUBOIS: There was two parts to it. Obviously, the one part� there was two parts. One part was from the keyword navigation to navigate from campus to building to floor to room and then to lobbies of floors. Then on the floor level, the navigation from door to door.

That grid system was� there was definitely some technical issues there. We had to use Azure in order to do that. Explorer is currently not 100% working well on the HoloLens 2. There are a lot of technical challenges.

The inner navigation testing was basically a codedriven kind of experience. For me, it was important to have people understand what is going on and asking them if it makes sense.

THOMAS LOGAN: Right.

ROLAND DUBOIS: Drive it a little bit. While they're doing it, speak out loud what they feel, what they think. We tested less than ten because this is a crowded event. If it is not a shiny thing, then you don't get the attention, but we still leveraged a lot.

There's 500 hackers and over 100 teams. In order to see everything� people have an attention span that is very limited. You get what you get. The user feedback I got was it made total sense.

Everybody got it, and I didn't have to explain much, which was important. I was working with mechanical engineers. They're not designers. To explain something that has a lot to do with user experience to people who are not user experience designer, it needs to be so simple and it doesn't degrade anyone.

If you can explain it to a 3yearold child and a 3yearold child explains it to the next one and that child kind of understands it, unless you're on that level, it is too complicated. That's the rule of thumb. I wanted to reach that level and I think it worked. My presentation took a long while to actually dig deep, but in principle it's clear.

THOMAS LOGAN: Yeah. I was thinking for that wayfinding� I know we had this presentation at one of the New York City meetups, but emergency exits or knowing the way out and making that accessible, that seems like a cool use.

ROLAND DUBOIS: Yes. When you create the threedimensional building, you upload floor plans and grids. Basically, you're painting by numbers. That's the game.

People with certain accessibility features or restrictions� like, you're not allowed to be in that room because you're not a staff member. We can create grid patterns that are relevant to the movable object, the person. The person has A, B, C privileges and then sees ABC grid pop up in the navigation of the indoor room. If I'm a wheelchair person, I don't care about the stairs.

These maps can be templated. We gave people that are working on that floor the chance to create grids specifically for, oh, we have an event. There's currently a lot of desks there. There's not an empty room, so it is not navigational.

The quick disposable grid that is attached to the user is what the key element of what that one was. THOMAS LOGAN Right. Very cool. All right.

I'm going to take one more call for questions. We have time for one more, if anyone would like to ask it. Please do so now. We can also chat after the stream.

THOMAS LOGAN: Okay. I want to say thank you again, Roland, for the great presentation today. I really appreciate learning about this process. I hope it is something I can do with my company.

I want to say thank you to Tess from White Coat Captioning for the great captions today and to Joly MacFie from the Internet Society of New York. I was checking the YouTube stream and everything looked great today. The recording of this talk will be available on YouTube, and we also do recaps of the presentation. We'll be doing a recap of Roland's presentation on our blog at Equal Entry.

We'll be sharing that out. If you haven't, check out our YouTube page and subscribe. We're trying to get to a hundred subscribers so we can get our specific URL that will tie to a11y VR. We'll have our next meeting most likely in a month from now.

Again, thank you, everyone, for coming. We'll come now to the floor and have a conversation and socialize. We'll end this stream. Thanks, everyone.