✦ EYE-SPY
✧ UI/UX
Project Overview:
During my time at Melbourne Museum, I assisted in developing an app prototype under the working name ‘Eye-Spy’ for the Research Institute Gallery tucked away next to Dinosaur Walk. The aim of the Research Institute Gallery is to honour the work that researchers and scientists do and to those who are interested, explain how that goes about in different fields and for different objects. Whilst ‘Eye-spy’ still remains a prototype it is a very polished and refined piece.
Eye-spy is a image-recognition app where upon scanning one QR code, you are able to scan images of objects in their cases within the gallery. How the app works is at the start of my internship I helped to take >80 photos of each object in the gallery that would feed into the CMS and when someone scans an image. The CMS would then pick up 30% of the images randomly and feed back with the most similar looking photos/objects.
Tools:
- EyeSpy CMS
- Adobe Illustrator
- Microsoft Teams
- Miro
Team:
- Zoe Hogan
- Forbes Hawkins
- Sandy Houston
Images were taken from multiple perpectives including higher angles imitating adults and lower angles imitating younger children and adolescents. Depending on where the object was held, glare from the glass and reflection of the projector screen was also taken into account (as can be seen in the third photo)
Over the following month features like 3D scans and bird calls (audio feature) were added to specific items
Throughout the course of the project, weekly meetings were held to check-in on progress and quality assurance tests were run consistently since commencement of the project. This included testing on multiple devices to look for bugs (and getting help from other talented members of the museum from different departments too!) and really seeing if certain prompts were straightforward and comfortable to use as well.
After the prototype was ready for public testing came the issue of signage and where the QR code was going to be positioned. I made observations of how people moved about in the Research Institute Gallery and tested potential sites where the poster boards could go up. I drew up a sketch on Adobe Illustrator to observe the movement of visitors coming in and out of the space; from how long they spent in the gallery, to what section drew their attention more to what they found the most interesting in the space.
