#spatialchat

Resource Generation is a multiracial membership community of young people (18-35) with wealth and/or class privilege committed to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. With a diversified agenda of events - since still impossible the physical ones due to the covid-19 pandemic - this time they plan a consulting cafe using SpatialChat.

SpatialChat is an online platform that allows users (through an avatar) to move in a virtual stage where the environment sound is spatial, permitting an experience similar to open space conversation. However, this experience has different usability from the most famous apps used during this pandemic (like Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams).

I was invited to assist and produce visual graphics for this upcoming event: Wealth Accumulation Action Cafe. My challenge was to plan and design a series of backgrounds for three types of SpatialChat rooms they have in the project:

A welcome room, with a schedule, host, and guide on how to use the SpatialChat.

Three dedicated and private areas for consulting conversations.

A common area designed for group dynamics, conversations, and multimedia content.

The Solution:

Since people can walk through the SpatialChat room, all the information needs to be available “on the floor” (background). For the first room, I placed the event host centralized on the page – the area is also the start spot for the users – facilitating quick help to the newcomers.

I decided to use external PNG files for the event schedule and “how to use SpatialChat”, this enables a constant readable quality and quick change in last-minute modifications without changing all the background. Animated gifs and music from Youtube are used to help the users to understand how sound works on SpatialChat.

For the dedicated rooms, where the consulting tables will be placed, one request was extremely important: each group should be able to have a private conversation without sound leaking from the other ones. For this it was necessary to execute sound and proximity tests - web and mobile - to understand how far need to be the distance between avatars to prevent sound mixing. From that, it was developed a wireframe that helps to produce the final design.

The common area has no request, yet they plan some different activities for this room. So, it was suggested a clean background design that served as a template, changing small details for each activity during the event. That way, people are still familiar with the room even with the small changes.

Since I have opportunity to work and test SpatialChat in other projects before, I verified that users usually react to the graphic elements in the same way they react to real-life ones, for example: If there are chairs around a table, users will place their avatars on the chairs, but not in the table (except if is party time). Following that and knowing the art direction should be targeted in a young adult/adult public (18-35), I used elements that remind real-life events (like tables, chairs, plants, open theater…) and colors to pop the eyes, but in a level that does not affect the legibility (also colorblind-friendly).