Clients

Rivers Agile internal product development + a global packaging and brand experience company

Overview/Need

As VR technology continues to mature, we are seeing more industry investment in VR products and services, higher consumer demand, emerging ecosystems and marketplaces, and not to mention a lot of buzz in the media. For all of us who work in tech, it is impossible to tune out the relentless drumbeat of VR and AI throughout our daily work. At Rivers Agile we seek opportunities that are less hyped but still interesting to us as technologists and valuable to our clients. One such opportunity is for businesses to virtualize experiences with their products and incorporate VR into their product development, even if their end product entirely exists in the real world.

Product designers have long used focus groups, prototypes, and survey data to create feedback loops within product development. Experience designers extended these techniques to physical spaces like retail store layouts, brick-and-mortar service centers, entertainment venues, etc., having users provide feedback on their experience and using it for improvement. Web 2.0 provided additional tools to these disciplines, allowing designers to recruit users and conduct testing through video conferencing and screen sharing. VR is the next logical step in this evolution.

Responsibilities/Approach

Rivers Agile is currently helping a marketing and experience design firm incorporate VR into their offerings. Use cases we are focusing on include:

• Create a VR prototype of a physical product and test it
• Simulate an in-store customer experience and get feedback
• Level-up user workshops with VR instead of webcam and screen-share
• Measure user behavior and interactions through the VR instrumentation

Results

Currently in the early stage of development, the product will give brands the ability to virtually engage with users and collect data on how these users interact with virtual environments and assets.