What’s a Concept App?
Concepts are small, free experiences published on Magic Leap World that showcase art or functionality. Concepts let you showcase new ideas, designs, interactions, and gestures in Magic Leap World where other creators can discover them.
These lightweight experiences are designed to inspire and be shared with our developer community. Because the criteria for publishing concepts are simpler, you can share concepts quickly to get feedback on your projects.
Duration
5 Months
Platforms
Mixed Reality, Web Platform
Responsibility
Product Design, User Research
Prompt
How might we create a type of apps that encourage experiments and explorations?
Being an emerging platform and technology, we wanted to create a safe and inviting space for developers to build lightweight Magic Leap apps with the primary goal of showcasing new ideas, gathering feedback, and encouraging collaboration.
Design Intentions
It should be like a spark.
We think of Concept Apps like kindles or sparks that are the beginnings of a story or an experience creators would like to share.
Simple but not cheap.
We want to encourage creators’ creativity and originality. We believe that a good platform will inspire uniqueness and innovation.
Move fast and break reality.
We want developers to move fast – maybe fail a couple times before getting it right. Encouragement to rapidly prototype and ship concepts is a theme that’s sprinkled throughout the development journey.
Make it social.
One recurring theme we gathered from talking to our developers is the sense of community and collaboration. We wanted to incorporate the social element on this platform that is healthy and helping.
Iterative Design - Sketches and Wireframes
Sketches and Wireframes
We went through rounds of iterations and testing with Magic Leap users and developers. From the publishing user flow, to the icon template, to the UI on device, we optimized both the ease of development and publishing, and the end users’ experience.
Lofi Sketches
Lofi Sketches
Lofi Wireframes
Icon Template Exploration
Final Solution
1
Concept icon
2
Concept title and age restriction
3
Gallery
4
Descriptions
5
Download CTA
6
Privacy link
7
Social links
Concept Apps Detail Page
The concept detail page is much simplified than that of the standard app: We prioritize the screenshots, the short description, and the social links. What used to be a 3-fold scrolling is now 1-fold. Users are able to quickly browse through the different concepts with ease. We added a section for developers to share their social media accounts for potential collaboration and feedback gathering.
See Publishing Guide
View Preview Video
1
File upload
2
Ring color
3
Download icon file
4
3D environment
5
Preview toggle
6
Tool bar
Concept Icon Builder
To make it easier to publish, we built a custom icon builder. Unlike a standard app that requires 3D Diorama, concept icon builder takes in a 2D icon image and maps it on a curved surface.
Interact with Live Version
View Preview Video
Concept Apps Publishing Flow
Another huge part of this project is to redesign the publishing flow to make iterating faster for developer. We greatly simplified the steps one has to take to publish a Concept App.
See Live Version
Requires Magic Leap developer account
Impact
Concept Apps were featured on multiple tech articles (such as Venture Beats and Next Reality). We immediately saw huge impact on the Magic Leap developer community and user behavior. We even had big companies (such as this one from WSJ) publishing Concepts Apps.
50+
Concept Apps Made in 2019.
20%
Increase device usage
95%
of developers like this tool
Moving Forward
The introduction of Concept Apps won critical praises from our developers and users. But this is just the beginning. There are many different areas to improve upon the existing platforms:
- Well-defined developer journey from Concept Apps, to Alpha, to Beta, and to Early Release.
- Concept Apps promotion and curation.
- Reviews mechanism for Concept Apps.
The Team
This success would not be possible without this awesome team:
Matt W. (Director), Charlie H. (Lead Engineer), Brennan C. (Backend Engineer), Morgan V. (Creative 3D Engineer), Jak T. (Frontend Engineer), Zach C. (Frontend Engineer), Eric Y. (Lead Design, User Researcher).
