After the last mega post, I thought I’d keep this a bit simpler to cleanse the palette.
I came across this Unity3D Car Configurator concept created by a chap named Wensk in China. After the in-depth look at the Porsche configurator in the last post, the concept here from Wensk actually demonstrates some of the potential user experience possibilities I was describing.
Although this is a concept, I’m sure you can see the great potential here. In essence, the object we are configuring, in this instance a car, is the core focus of our attention. We can explore it from different angles, interact with it by opening the doors or exploding out the car panels, and we are not boxed in with multiple menus ‘all up in our grill’.
We can summons the menus at will, with the click of the ‘Menu’ button, and they swoop in non-intrusively. Even when the menus are on screen, they don’t feel overly oppressive. I appreciate this is a concept and the number of menus are minimal, but you can see the potential to bring in context sensitive menus as needed based on your selections.
What I like about this is that it’s a bit of fun! Who says we can’t have music blasting while we personalise our ride. Who says we can’t have options to turn on and off different parts of that music. The success of future technology will be in it’s ability to engage users and give them a positive experience. As me and my old flat-mate use to say when it came to doing the flat admin…”turn it into a game”.
I’m not concerned about the overall style or graphics here, as we know we have the ability to design our own environments, shaders, lighting and menus. It’s more about the user experience, and the ability to engage people by pulling them into a virtual world and come up with more immersive, intuitive, natural, non-intrusive, engaging and fun ways to buy products.
Thanks for stimulating the neurons Wensk. Perhaps if we do a mash-up of Porsche and this, we’ll get the sort of result we are looking for.
3D Product Configurator Design 