Relationship Design is the profession of crafting and orchestrating digital aspects of our lives into meaningful and personalized experiences. That however begs the question what would actually constitute as a “good” relationship between a human and a digitally augmented thing or environment — and how it could be measured.

A vision of relatable objects and systems, based on Star Trek TNG

In Star Trek TNG it is interesting to look at the level of intelligence the computer displays, especially when simulating virtual agents in the holodeck. The intelligence of these holographic agents is fluctuating wildly, based on whatever fits the desired story line of the respective episode. But this might actually make sense. …

In 2016 Jules Ehrhardt posted an article called State of the Digital Nation on the Marvel blog. In it he described the current and future state of the digital consultancy industry. Back then I very much agreed with one of his central points: The (digital) agency business model is broken.

I spent almost 10 years in a high-end digital agency and it was always weird to me how the industry on one hand glorified their own creativity as the miracle that only true members of the inner circle can wield. …

In my job I get to see and talk to a lot of great VR / AR companies, from indies to startups to huge organizations. A lot of them are asking the same question: “How do we make money with MR?” Similarly, some more forward looking companies ask: “How do we sensibly start with MR in our organization?” Both often run into the situation where they create solutions that don’t seem to gain traction and just bumble along.

OK, so let’s talk about the current challenges and one or two potential approaches how to create successful MR solutions (for different definitions of “success”). …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article to help businesses and organizations understand the terminology and challenges when creating digital product configurators. It was well received and readers started reaching out to discuss other digital trends. A lot of questions were around assessing the potential of new Augmented Reality technologies, specifically headsets. This was probably driven by a huge number of announcements during CES2020.

So let’s dive into AR a little bit to understand the terminology and challenges around the topic, with the goal to better assess the potential of individual solutions.

First, the usual disclaimer: While the views in this article are mine, please be aware that I work for Microsoft around IoT and Mixed Reality things. …

For a while now I have been talking about strategic digital trends, specifically about their impact and how they influence businesses and organizations. Strategic trends are long-term, society scale trends that will affect individuals, groups as well as businesses. In regards to digital, these strategic trends are commonly described loosely under the term “Digital Transformation”.

When looking at these trends, people tend to look at them in a vacuum. In my view it is also important to understand how individual trends interact with each other and how they change the landscape as they scale throughout society. …

I like watching videos about digital product configurators. Having worked on a lot of them for different industries (from automotive to construction to coffee machines), I still enjoy seeing how different people and teams have solved “the usual set of UX, UI and technical challenges”.

Here is a one that recently popped up in my LinkedIn timeline:

First of all: This is excellent work by Parth Anand, congratulations to him and the team. …

Lately I am thinking about camera equipment, specifically professional, studio grade equipment. There have been really cool innovations around computational photography in smartphones lately, for example with night sight. Google is taking a more algorithmic / machine learning approach and Apple seemingly a more physical / sensor based approach to this concept. In any case they challenge the notion of what a “photo” is and extend the environment in which photography can be used.

Also, I’ve been working out of a professional photo studio for the last couple of weeks (disclosure: It’s my wife’s studio 😊) and I was able to have a closer look on the technology they are using. Cameras are still mostly focused on the optical quality of lenses and the raw abilities of the sensor. This makes sense as both are a clear differentiator from smartphones and a field where they can’t catch up (without massively compromising on size and weight). …

Last week I was traveling. I also thought about buttons quite a bit. Before I go into details a quick disclosure: I work for Microsoft on Mixed Reality things and I will talk about some related topics. That said, all views are mine.

For StereoKit, Nick Klingensmith had hacked in some buttons to be able to spawn new items and clear the scene. Simple but effective.

But that got me thinking. I have worked with a number of AR/VR/MR toolkits, but as a developer I didn’t really like how most of them handled UI interactions.

From 2D planes to 3D spaces

In 2D space, interactions are relatively simple as everything happens on a flat plane: The screen. The user moves the mouse, the cursor moves on the plane respectively. The user clicks, something happens on the respective position. The user taps at a certain position on a touchscreen, it is mapped to the respective position of the plane. And while there are weird things like Force Touch, these are mostly just different types of clicks. …