microsoft story remix
The new generation
Story Remix was announced in 2017 as the new way to navigate through your pictures in the Photos App, an innovative system with many features that would improve the experience to share and create stories with family and friends
Redesigning the experience
The team worked hard on the UI/UX aspect of the system, redefining the hierarchy on the system in order to improve accessibility and the experience in general when navigating the interface.
UX motion design was an important aspect to create better spatial awareness and relationship between the content and its access. Several motion studies were created and pitched to the team to find the right path. Also, user research was part of the process, bringing people to the office and asking them to navigate under certain conditions to find their pain points and fix those.
Edit and share easily
The super talented team worked on a system that allows you to produce videos to share by grabbing and dropping the files into a simple timeline. Even edit automatically and recognize faces from your friends.
Making it 3D
Using the already existing Paint 3D enormous as a tool, the team implemented the ability to drag objects into your photos and videos in an easy way to create fantastic presentations or fun productions with your friends
Making the Magic…
My main task at the team was producing the VFX on Unity. A system I have never used before at the time, it was a great challenge but with lots of satisfaction at the time. The production not only included the creation of shaders, textures, and the implementation in general, but part of my duties was also doing the envisioning and market research for the persona that was meant for the app. Also producing the technical and artistic guidelines so the team in India could keep creating more and also be able to follow the pipeline to be implemented into the server.
Working with Devs
Producing the VFX was one thing. I also helped with the UI/UX design of the system. My experience as a motion designer and working on editing and animation environment was important for the team to be able to translate and simplify and translate this workflow into a more simple system, which kids could understand.
One of them was working side to side with Devs to produce a tracking system that could be able to stick our effects and 3D objects into the videos, also envisioning the way the interface would communicate the feedback of this experience to the user.
Teaching to an AI
At Microsoft, we counted with a large library for facial recognition but now we needed to be able to make the system recognize tracking scenarios. Together we established the right scenarios based on hardware capabilities for the user and taught our system how to track an environment and use it either as a surface or point of reference.
Teaching the user
It was also important to teach the users how to interact with the UI once it was done.
Envisioning these animations was part of the process too.
Presenting on Build
Now we needed to present our product into the build and the Keynote 2017, for this occasion we established a soccer scenario being represented by our persona. We worked on a storyboard and shot some lo-fi examples to be presented to our team. Working with a concept illustrator we created the meteor which would be the star effect on the presentation.
