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Inner Space: Case Study
Designing cells that students could touch in AR.
InnerSpace lab trailer
Context
How could we utilize then-new hand tracking?
Brought onto InnerSpace to figure out how Meta Quest 3's new hand-tracking capabilities could be used for the lab's educational tools. The goal was to visualize a cellular process and let users understand it intuitively through actions only possible in AR, with zero barrier to entry, someone with no technical background should be able to navigate it through hand tracking alone.
What was needed
Building a cellular reaction in AR.
An interactive experience where users build an insulin monomer, then an insulin hexamer, to see how the structure comes together spatially, then trigger a reaction by introducing GLP1. Pieces are scattered around the physical space in AR, so users walk around, find the right pieces, and place them like assembling something by hand. Two things stood in the way of that working: users needed to know what to place and where without just watching the reaction happen first, and picking up and orienting the pieces needed to actually feel comfortable in hand tracking.
Work I did
Designing an Intuitive Experience for Education
I tested the experience with 10 friends in my apartment, watching how they moved through it and interviewing them afterward. The clearest problem was the original tutorial design: it showed the reaction happening, then had the user replicate it afterward, watch, then copy. People couldn't reliably tell what they were supposed to place or where. Stakeholders were also clear on a requirement I had to design around: they wanted the experience to teach through the action itself, not through replication after the fact. Those two things together, what I was seeing in testing and what stakeholders needed to be true, are what led me to design what I call the ghost-system: a translucent preview showing exactly where a piece needed to go while the user was still doing the placement, so the guidance lived inside the action instead of before it.
The second problem from that same testing was physical: manipulating the pieces required rotating your hand into uncomfortable positions just to orient something correctly, which multiple people brought up unprompted. I introduced two-hand rotation for that, letting users orient pieces using both hands together instead of twisting one wrist into an awkward angle.
The harder balancing act underneath both fixes was translating for two very different audiences at once. The researchers cared most about precise biological coordinates, exactly where each piece needed to align to stay scientifically accurate. Students were just trying to learn the concept for the first time. My job was holding that precision in the underlying system while keeping the controls themselves casual enough that a first-time user wouldn't feel like they needed a science background to use it.
What Changed
Cut the time to tutorial completion by 35%
The redesign cut tutorial completion time by 35%, and in follow-up testing, students got through the tutorialized version without asking for outside help, which they hadn't been able to do with the original. The final build was verified against accuracy requirements, so the fix held on both sides: still scientifically correct, but usable by someone walking in cold.
What I Learned
Working with drastically different stakeholders, Product Feel
Two things carried past this project. Small touch-and-feel details, like how comfortable a rotation feels in your hand, shape whether someone understands an experience even when they can't articulate why something felt off. And designing for two stakeholder groups with opposite priorities, rigor for the researchers, approachability for the students, meant the solution couldn't just split the difference, it had to satisfy both fully at once.
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