THE STORM CONE
ROLE
UX/UI Designer & Engineer
DESCRIPTION
In partnership with the University of Salford and Salford Art Gallery, I was delighted to work as a freelance designer and engineer on The Storm Cone Project. Led by Laura Daly, the artefact is a mobile application designed to revive the beauty of bandstand music using AR technology and binaural sounds.
YEAR
2019-2022
PARTNERS
University of Salford, Salford Art Gallery, Arts Council England
TOOLS
Adobe Photoshop, Unity Engine, Unity XR, Mapbox API
AVAILABILITY
Available in Google Play and Apple Store
DEVELOPMENT SHOTS
DEVELOPMENT KEYNOTES
THE SCOPE & THE AUDIENCE
The Storm Cone project aimed to launch on any mobile platform (phones, iPhones, tablets, iPads etc) and bring the experience to a wide audience, ranging from teenagers to mature people, who would enjoy listening to the 3D music from the AR bandstand. From a UI Engineering perspective, supporting this many different aspect ratios proved challenging, especially considering that iOS development is locked to their platform, xCode, to which I had no access.
The app also integrated the XR component, which added another difficulty level - optimization. As we were targeting relatively old devices, the interface had to be as optimized as possible to ensure that there is no power wasted and anyone can enjoy the experience end-to-end (the whole musical experience lasts about 20 minutes with the camera and XR component on).
STEEP LEARNING CURVE
I started working on the Storm Cone project while I was still an undergraduate student. As one of the few members with game design expertise, the team went through a steep learning experience to even out the lacunes and aim towards the same goal.
Laura Daly, the artist behind the Storm Cone idea, had never led a technical project before. Collaborating with her was a delight and a great learning experience. The designs I created for the project were mainly inspired by existing mobile games, with a touch of originality. However, Laura took these designs further and demonstrated that UI can be twisted in an abstract, artistic manner and still communicate the right information.
On the other side, working with an artist with no connection to video games taught me that some concepts I was considering trivial are the product of hundreds of hours of gaming and not everyone understands them.
TECHNOLOGIES USED
Throughout the development of Storm Cone, I interacted with different tools and technologies, some of which I was already familiar with:
- Unity Engine, the main development tool
- Adobe Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, XD
- Mapbox API
- Firebase database
- Google Play developer tools
