Ekoo is a remote 3D design platform tailored for the game industry
Time
May - Aug 2021
Industry
Game Industry
Members
Haoran Xu, Cynthia Lee, Duoning Zhen, Zoe Zhang
Role
Product Designer, Gesture Control Prototyper
EKOO in a Nutshell...
Problem
Miscommunication and inefficiencies in remote 3D animation pipelines during the transition from onsite to hybrid work in the pandemic.
Solution
Ekoo is a class project offers light weight 3D animation assets version control and feedback to streamline the animation pipeline remotely.
Game
Companies
Office
Remote 3D Character pipeline is broken...
Due to the shift to remote workflows during the pandemic, animators struggle to visualize, understand, and organize team annotations on 3D character animations.
How might we build a more effective multi-disciplinary collaboration tool in order to improve the creative cooperation for remote design teams in the game industry?
“
Game Design Document
Solution Preview #1
annotation Editor
Solution Preview #2
the interviews
After a few rounds of interviewing designers and stakeholders in several major game companies, I found out Animation teams face challenges with fragmented tools, miscommunication, and disorganized feedback in remote workflows.
"Hard to collaborate with many apps"
Collaboration on animation contains both real-time and asynchronous scenarios.
-Art Director
"Lack of remote working tools"
Lack of a professional tool designed for the collaboration on animation on the market.
-Animator
"Remote talks can cause confusion"
Collaborating online leads to more misunderstandings in the animation design process.
-Concept Designer
"hard to Document feedback"
Everyone annotates differently—sketching, referencing, or note-taking—make unifying them challenging.
-Concept Designer
problem
I identified several challenges, but the most critical issue, highlighted by the red lines, is that animation teams struggle to achieve a shared understanding of 3D assets remotely, resulting in excessive back-and-forth communication and increased crunch time.
target user
Therefore, the target user will focus primarily on three roles in the industry: Art Director, Concept Designer, and Animator.
What do they need?
Animation teams need a tool to work together in
real-time 3D collaboration, with easy asset managements and faster iterations.
Introducing EKOO
The real time 3D character pipeline tool
1.Real time collab
2.Easy to control
3.Fast iteration
01
opportunity
How can you organize feedback from different people and make sure the team can all catch up with each other's ideas?
Imagine you as the designer, after receiving these sketches from the art director, you have a total of 10 different feedback now.
Game Design Document
The game design document platform organizes the animation assets, annotations, and team collaborations. All in one, with no need to worry about moving files and documents between apps and losing them.
Feature 1/2
Upload and share the asset in EKOO or use another platform with your team. Include status updates and tags that clearly communicate the asset's status and needs.
All-in-One with EKOO
Painpoints
App Overload
Easily track your progress of work and checking the peer feedback on the page, including the sketch, posture, and note, which tells you exactly how to modify the assets.
Progress Tracking and Visualized Documentation system
Painpoints
Fragmented Collaboration,
Unorganized Feedback
02
opportunity
Imagine how you, as the art director, could describe this animation accurately to your designers so that there would be fewer misunderstandings.
If we use just words and simple gestures to describe an animation, 100 people will come up with 100 different visuals in their heads
annotation Editor
Annotating beyond text, you can make annotations by sketching on 3D modal, adjusting the posture of the character, and spotting the note in a specific location in space.
Feature 2/2
Make an annotation by simply using the pen tool to draw over the character, like an art director does when they give feedback in person.
sketch annotation
Painpoints
Lack of Clarity in Feedback
Can’t sketch? Annotating by simply dragging the head, arms, and legs of the character to communicate your desired posture.
posture annotation
Painpoints
Lack of Clarity in Feedback
Examples are important. Pick a place on the character, and annotate with an image of your preferred pose into the note with text description.
note annotation
Painpoints
Lack of Clarity in Feedback
Design Iteration 1/2
Assets nexus & Management
Screen Real Estate Not Enough For The Feedback
feedback
“The art director leaves plenty of feedback, definitely more than 4, so more space is needed for display the content”
iteration
Integrating the person who notes feedback, thumbnail images, and the importance of tasks into the model.
lack of context of the feedback
feedback
“Hard to aware of the target locations of the feedback, maybe some thumbnail image will help.”
iteration
Integrating the person who note the feedback, thumbnail image for the target assets, and the important of the task on the model.
game design document Final Iteration
Design Iteration 2/2
Animation asset preview and critique
hard to manage the posture all together
feedback
“Controlling the single nodes of the bones is not efficient, and it is hard to control the posture in 3D all together.”
iteration
Adding key parameter controls for the posture.
The Comments Section Is Hard To Discover
feedback
“It is hard read content of the comments.”
iteration
Listing the comments and sorting by users in a new window attached on the left side.
editor Final Iteration
USERFLOW
Ekoo streamlines game design workflows by integrating documentation, 3D annotations, and gesture controls for efficient, accurate, and collaborative animation.
test result
EKOO will not only solve the problems of people working during the pandemic, but also enable more collaborative process in the game industry and transform the way how people work and design the 3D space.
what i learn
How to use data to drive design decisions
During design process, I need to ask myself questions such as “ who, what, when, how” from the data collected.The team iterates on features and experiences based on user insights in an agile manner.
Being empathic with users and their pain points
In this project, I enjoy thinking the product holistically and listening to the users’ experience, feedback, and being an active listener.
It helps me understand the users’ pain points and create empathy with them.
One more thing…
the future of EKOO
I envision incorporating hand gesture controls in a 3D interface for more intuitive interaction with 3D space in EKOO's future.
However, due to time limitations, I have only experimented with a few options that require further evaluation.
I further advanced the concept of natural gesture design in my other projects like Encompass and the MR Gesture System.
Feel free to check them out!!!