Explore Takahiro’s Studio
Intuitive interaction design for a novel body-tracked gallery experience.
For the Seattle Asian Art Museum, I built a body-tracked interactive installation that let visitors explore the artist’s studio. My role covered interaction design, Unity prototyping, generative AI, VFX, and physical fabrication.
Intuitive design through iteration with users
My primary goal was to create an experience that was intuitive, compelling, and reliable for all visitors. To achieve this, I watched what first-time users attempted naturally — what they tried first, when they thwarted my own expectations, where they seemed to get confused or frustrated. Those observations drove iteration on the interaction model - I introduced flexibility to reduce the ways a user could be ‘wrong’ and reinforce a user’s paths to progression. Particularly, multiple visual signals worked together to indicate how close a user was to activating an on-screen hotspot, and the on-screen cursor was ‘magnetically’ pulled to valid selections rather than tracking viewer motion 1:1. I added a minimap and clearer navigation visuals after multiple users mentioned they wanted to understand the scope of the experience and all their available options. Through repeated trial runs with first-time users, we arrived at a system that was immediately intelligible and satisfying to explore.
Building faster with AI
Using AI coding tools enabled me to prototype competing interaction approaches in parallel and solicit feedback in hours instead of days. I also used generative AI to rapidly get curatorial buy-in for a time-lapse-style ‘screen saver’, ultimately using VFX to touch up the output & preserve original artwork exactly.
Outcomes
The final installation was successfully used unaided by both children and adults, typically encouraged exploration across multiple hotspots and rooms, and produced an unexpected form of spontaneous group play.
I couldn’t feel more comfortable leaving visitors to play and learn on their own in that space… People naturally join and play together. It’s a creative way to get people doing, seeing, and learning… That feels like good museum work.
