Samsung - Haven VR OS

 Challenge 

Samsung was an early investor in VR, releasing hardware before the market understood the technology. They wanted to bring VR to the wider market, positioning Gear VR as a forerunner of immersive experiences. Samsung asked EPAM to review their strategy and come up with an alternative view on how to take it forward. 

Key Tasks 

• Guerrilla interviews on VR landscape 

• Heuristic evaluation on existing VR applications 

• Work on ‘Haven’ OS concept 

• Brainstorm, prototype and test VR emoji 

• Iterate and solidify VR emoji 

• Conceptualize and test gesture experience design 

• Produce high-fidelity controller and gesture interaction guidelines 

• Storyboard application use cases 

Impact 

Samsung was excited with our proposed experience strategy on their operating system, they decided to take our concept in their R&D team to further develop and ideally launch in 2020. 

Haven environment

Haven is the launching point for users’ experience of Samsung VR, giving them a delightful experience to embark from, and return to. Haven uses the domains to create a coherent and logical taxonomy for organizing apps, tools and widgets facilitating ready access for the user to step into Unbound Immersion. The 6 domains are used to create an ordering structure to organize content across the Pods: Productivity, Creative, Health, Discovery, Media & Events, and Social Pods contain contextual content related to the domain. The Library Pod acts as both an inventory and a store, and Settings allows the user to tailor Haven to their unique needs.

Global Pod Menu

The Global Pod Menu facilitates Unbound Immersion by allowing users to explore VR in their own way.

INSIDE HAVEN: The Global Pod Menu allows ready access to everything that Haven has to offer, allowing the userto quickly move between Pods.

AND BEYOND: This menu also operates outside of Haven within both Samsung applications and partner experiences, allowing the user to move freely within VR space, based on needs and path of discovery.

Pod Example : Productivity

VR Emoji

We created a base set of VR emojis that allow users to express what they are feeling using simple gestures. Through these gestures, they launch dynamic animations adding delight to their experience. Started with researching the most common emotions people express in real life and via texting and social media; then explored common body and hand gestures that are universally understood. I created gifs to demonstrate which gesture activates each emoji and along side animated the output for developers to program so we could test in the VR space. 

Operating System Demo

This is a recording of what we demoed in Seoul infront of the C-level suite in Samsung to show the overarching strategy and experience concept of Haven.