We’re embarking on a journey to completely overhaul our user interface and user experience in Immerse Creator.

This was a very preliminary and impromptu brainstorm discussion that followed our bi-weekly scrum on Thursday, December 28th. We were mainly focused on designing the design process itself.

These are just some notes I took during the meeting.

What should our design process consist of? Should we have a single design lead, or invite more open participation? Maybe some of each? Who will be the core team to take on this process? Who on the team has bandwidth / interest? Where should we start? How can we make this process more open and transparent? How can we invite and encourage community feedback?

We were often tempted during the discussion to drill into specific details of the interface, but kept pulling back to the big picture. It’s important to not get too far ahead until we have the high level experience determined, so we can begin with the end in mind.

Part of our goal for our current sprint was to complete integration of our current Shapes v2 module, but we instead decided to leave it as it is for now and instead focus on this UI/UX overhaul since many of the details we’ll be re-designing it will impact Shapes.

We discussed some VR UI precedents we’ve seen that work well. Others that don’t work so well.

We decided that our next sprint will focus on the 1st minute of user experience. What does a Creator see when they first open the app? Tutorial? Scenes to choose from? Blank scene? Place their first object (let there be light? ;-)

We’ll also be focusing this next sprint on very high level concepts for the overall UI design. Is it a toolbelt? Radius of buttons like Dash? Fanny pack?

What do you think? We're just getting started, and look forward to sharing more as we dig farther into this design overhaul.

See you in Immerse!

Greetings Creators!

For the past several months, we’ve been hard at work on some epic new features for Immerse that we’re excited to be rolling out in today’s update.

I’ll walk you through how to use these features in this Update Video.

Absolutely everything about Immerse is subject to change over time! That’s precisely why we’re in Early Access with this beta launch, and this is a very preliminary ‘version 1’ debut for these new features. While we encourage you to sketch and create as much as you’d like, we urge everyone to please keep in mind that this is definitely not a polished product. There will be bugs, and there will be changes.

You can now import your own FBX models into Immerse Creator! This was the community’s most requested feature, by far, so we’re very excited to have a preliminary implementation in place for you to try out. There are limits to the import, which I’ll talk about more in the video linked above. I got a little crazy during Turbosquid’s last weekend sale, as you can see in the screenshot above. =)

You can now export your Shapes Creations using the new export feature! It will only export your shapes - not any assets or imported meshes, but you can then bring that file into your own modeling software, or even use it as the basis for a 3D print.

Immerse Shapes tool has some new features in development, including the ability to modify vertices, faces, and edges. Our intention is only to make it possible to quickly sketch very basic forms with Immerse, so we’re purposely keeping our Shapes tool fairly simple. If you want to create more advanced models, we encourage you to model in Blender, Maya, 3DS, etc. and import your model as an FBX.

We’ve introduced a new ‘Packs’ tab in the Immerse Assets tool. In there, you’ll find tons of new asset packs available. We’ll be adding new assets frequently, which will show up automatically in your Immerse Creator without requiring an update.

You can now take a screenshot inside Immerse Creator. We would love to see what you’ve created! Please post your screenshots to our subreddit: r/immersecreator

You can now lock and toggle the visibility of containers. Getting into the habit of actively using the container system is requisite to effectively managing your Creations.

We’ve incorporated the awesome MixCast tool into Immerse Creator, so if you’re subscribed to their tool on Steam and hit ‘1’ on your keyboard, it will activate MixCast so you can easily create your own mixed reality videos!

User Experience and Polish. We now have version 1 implementation of our core feature set, and now we’re going to keep polishing and refining those features. We know there are lots of basic usability issues we need to address, so we’re undertaking a UI/UX overhaul that will make Creating a lot easier and more comfortable. This is another pretty major undertaking, so it may take a while, but we’re hoping to get it right and look forward to launching our next major update.

We’re very interested to hear your input on new features, bug reports, etc. Please use the Steam Community Hub for Immerse Creator to share your thoughts: Here.

We would also love to see your creations and hear your thoughts on our subreddit: Here.

That’s it! Thanks for your interest in Immerse Creator and happy Creating!

Jon Brouchoud and the Immerse Team

info@archvirtual.com