Autodesk and HoloLens

As a Principle Creative Director for the HoloLens Experiences group, my team developed high-impact prototypes to show Microsoft executives, and VIP partners how HoloLens could solve problems and create opportunities in their businesses.

Starting from the brief, “designing for 3D in 3D”, we interviewed industrial designers and mechanical engineers to learn about their tools, and how they work. This understanding let us establish a set of user-focused principles:

True size + scale. Working on a 2D screen, even experts can lose sight of big picture and develop “CAD goggles” that trick them into dwelling on unimportant details. Holograms allow designers and clients to see their work at real-world scale, reducing the need for expensive and time-consuming physical models.

Enhance existing workflows. Designers spend tens of thousands of hours mastering their CAD tools. Organizations spend millions on tools and training. To gain adoption, HoloLens needs integrate with existing workflows. This means changes made on the user’s desktop computer show up instantly in the HoloLens, and vice versa.

Information in context. Industrial designers are reluctant to abandon the certainty of physical models, but those models are slow and expensive to build. HoloLens can fuse digital content to physical objects; a hybrid approach that lets designers iterate quickly, with higher confidence.

This project secured a partnership with Autodesk, and the demo was publicly presented when the partnership was announced during Microsoft's keynote at the Worldwide Partner Conference in 2015.

Here's a video of that on-stage presentation. Video password available upon request.