Focus Buddy
Productivity app for people with ADHD.
Product
MVP of MR productivity app with AI voice assistant for people with ADHD.
Team
- 3 developers
- 2 designers (including me)
Tools
- Unity
- Meta Presence Platform SDK
- OpenAI API
- Blender
- ShapesXR
Timeline
2 days
Summary
Focus Buddy is an immersive productivity app developed at the XR Creator Con (XRCC). Part of the Utility & Design Track, it’s designed to help people with ADHD maintaining concentration on specific tasks. The app features an AI powered voice assistant that simplifies tasks into manageable steps, a Pomodoro timer for efficient time management, and an environment dimming option to safely reduce distractions.
Links
Main features
- AI-powered Focus Buddy: Meet Tommy, an AI voice assistant and cute tomato companion, who helps you break down complex tasks into simple visual to-do lists.
- Distraction reduction: Transform your workspace by dimming the distracting environment while maintaining full visibility in your focus areas.
- Pomodoro technique: Embrace the Pomodoro Technique by rotating Tommy as a kitchen timer and engaging in focus sessions followed by rewarding breaks.
How we built it
- Created paper storyboards to align the feature scope and user flow.
- Prioritized, defined, and distributed features. Each team member received a responsibility area.
- Iteratively prototyped the experience in ShapesXR for UX tests and technical reviews.
- Created a 3D model of the tomato in Blender, downloaded icons from Google icons and fonts from Google Fonts.
- Implemented the concept in Unity with the Meta Presence Platform SDK and the OpenAI API, regularly conducting QA sessions using Meta headsets.
Interactive Prototype
Challenges we ran into
The team faced various obstacles that slowed down progress and collaboration. These challenges encompassed ineffective feature prioritization, communication gaps resulting in misunderstandings, and disagreements over conceptual approaches. Additionally, the use of novel technologies contributed to frequent software bugs due to insufficient or outdated documentation. Addressing these issues became imperative to regain momentum and successfully meet project objectives.
Lessons learned
Throughout XRCC, we learned several key lessons. Foremost, we found the mentor’s feedback incredibly valuable for shaping our ideas and making smart decisions. The help and guidance throughout the hack was great. Plus, we learned to focus on building an essential version of our product first, saving time and effort later. We also discovered the importance of not getting caught up in making too many design changes that could delay progress. These lessons helped us move forward efficiently and effectively in our project development.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Focus Buddy shifted from extending reality to diminishing it in Mixed Reality (MR), an application that has been explored in numerous augmented reality (AR) projects but represents a significant innovation in mixed reality (MR). Besides, we supported each other extensively during development and dedicated ourselves tirelessly through the night to complete the project and its packaging. Despite fatigue and occasional frustration, we also managed to have a great time and consistently supported each other.
What's next
Possible features:
- Blurring the environment instead of dimming.
- Erasing disctractive objects from the environment.
- Defining objects to be in passthrough insted of windows.
- Tracking objects for changing their passthrough frames with changing perspective.
- Add Scene API.
