At Spiral Technology, our mission is to enhance Mixed Reality by making it more intelligent, seamless, and engaging. Our project: Spector, an app designed for marking, labeling, and measuring in a mixed-reality world. And at the heart of this app is Marker. Here we will tell how the UX of the Marker starts.

Just Before Your Eyes

Picture this: you make a quick gesture or tap a button and a virtual object appears right in front of you. Marker floating about a meter away, ready to be dragged and dropped wherever you please. It’s simple, intuitive, but a little too freeform. To mark something you should toss the marker to it. There should be some connection to reality.

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When the Robot Poops It

Enter our next idea: a virtual assistant. It flows beside you and each time you need to mark an object you tap on and it appears just where that assistant is. So in other words you can manage the position where the marker pops more precisely. Also you can predefine some starting parameters which could vary from marker to marker.

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As a collateral idea the marker begins to snap to the floor. It could still be moved around like before, but it finally had a sense of place. And that simple snap-to-surface trick became a feature we hadn’t planned but definitely needed.

In the Right Place, at the Right Time

So we ditched the floating assistant and focused on getting the markers to do what they do best: stick to real-world surfaces. Now, with the Hololens, you’ve got these rays shooting from your hands, just point, click and Marker is placed right where you’re looking.

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And while virtual surfaces don’t always line up perfectly with the real world, it’s surprisingly not a big deal. You can still move Marker around, snapping it to nearby meshes.

The screen-based approach — where you create something where you clicked — didn’t work well in a 3D space. In fact, the transition from 2D to 3D was often unclear, not just in the case of the marker. It turns out that, for better results, we often need to limit the degrees of freedom.