MR Community Engagement & Evangelism
Apr 2018 – Present, Mixed Reality | Microsoft
To design tools, samples, and guidelines, it is crucial to understand the customers’ (developers and creators) pain points. Creating several Mixed Reality apps as an indie creator helped me understand the pain points and pitfalls. While building UX components for MRTK (Mixed Reality Toolkit), I actively addressed the pain points from my own experiences and community feedback. It has always been inspiring to see how the creative community uses the toolkit to create innovative experiences for mixed reality.
Understanding the pain points through the developer community channels
Through the Mixed Reality Developer Forum and HoloDevelopers Slack channel, I monitored and created the list of the common issues and challenges that developers are facing in mixed reality app design and development.
Building Empathy by Making
Just like other indie developers who are new to mixed reality, I started learning Unity and HoloLens app design/development through the tutorials and samples. I created and published multiple HoloLens apps to understand the design and development flow and pipeline for Mixed Reality apps, documented the process and pain-points using Unity and HoloToolkit (MRTK v1). I distilled insights to inform the common behavior/control patterns effort.
Sharing Experience with the Community
To share my journey as an indie developer/designer creating apps for HoloLens, I write articles on Medium.
“Yoon Park. You are my hero. Your medium post on typography is one of the two greatest things ever written about XR (the second is Mike Alger’s introduction to Interface Design for VR). Thank you. For everything.”
James – Mixed Reality Engineer & Microsoft Windows Development MVP
“Your videos and Medium articles — making the MRTK plug-and-play component ethos tangible — really enable those of us who are creative but don’t know C#/VisualStudio to still be able to make VR/AR projects with Unity. Thank you!”
Chuck – YouTube
Presentations at AR/MR/VR conferences
To help the Mixed Reality developer community, I actively participate in conferences and meetups. I created multiple presentations on MRTK’s UX Building Blocks deep-dive content with rich images/videos/infographics in multiple languages. (English/Japanese/Korean)
Tokyo HoloLens Meetup
Microsoft MR Dev Days Japan 2020
Dec 16, 2020, Virtual conference, Global
Topic: MRTK’s UX Building Blocks (Presented in Japanese)
Event page: Mixed Realty Dev Days Japan 2020
Event session videos: http://aka.ms/MRDDJP-archive
Tokyo HoloLens Meetup vol. 21
July 29, 2020, Virtual conference, Global
Topic: MRTK’s Button Deep Dive (Presented in Japanese)
AWE(Augmented World Expo) 2020
May 26-29, 2020, Virtual conference, Global
Topic: Building Instinctual Interactions on HoloLens and Beyond using MRTK
Presented with Julia Schwarz
https://www.awexr.com/usa-2020/agenda/1151-building-instinctual-interactions-on-hololens-and-
Microsoft Mixed Reality Dev Days 2020
May 21-22, 2020, Virtual conference at AltspaceVR
Topic: MRTK UX Building Blocks Deep Dive
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/mixed-reality/mrtks-ux-building-blocks
HoloLens Meetup Japan at Cluster
Apr 22, 2020, at Cluster VR, 400+ attendees from multiple cities – Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Kobe, and more.
Topic: MRTK UX Component Updates (Presented in Japanese)
Microsoft Global MVP Summit
Mar 16-19, 2020, at Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA
Topic: MRTK UX Building Blocks Deep Dive
MR Accelerator
Jan 27-28, 2020, at Microsoft Reactor, San Francisco, CA, USA
Topic: HoloLens 2, UX elements, MRTK overview
Ladies That UX Seattle
Dec 6, 2019, at Microsoft Reactor, Redmond, WA, USA
Topic: HoloLens 2, UX elements, MRTK overview
Presented with Julia Schwarz, Sophie Stellmach
Unity Dev Days LA
Nov 9, 2019, at USC(University of Southern California), LA, USA
Topic: HoloLens 2 & MRTK demo
DUB Hacks at UW (University of Washington)
Oct 12, 2019, at University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Topic: HoloLens 2, MRTK overview
Unity
Aug 20, 2019, at Unity, Bellevue, WA, USA
Topic: HoloLens 2, MRTK’s UX building blocks
Tokyo HoloLens Meetup – July 2019
July 8, 2019, at Microsoft Japan, Tokyo, Japan
Topic: HoloLens 2, MRTK’s UX building blocks
Medium Post
Session Recording Video (Presented in Japanese)
Unity Unite Berlin 2018
June 20, 2018, at Station Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Topic: MRTK(v1)’s UX building blocks
Session recording on YouTube
AWE(Augmented World Expo) 2018
May 30, 2018, at Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA
Topic: MRTK(v1)’s UX building blocks
Session recording on YouTube
Microsoft Build Developer Conference 2018 – MR Jam
Introduced new building blocks on Mixed Reality Toolkit at Build 2018, with Katherine Harris.
Holographic Academy – Designing Type In Space for HoloLens
June 19, 2017, at Microsoft Garage, Redmond, WA, USA
Topic: Designing Typography Insight for HoloLens (Presented in Japanese)
Japanese Developer Community
Through the Mixed Reality Academy and online channels, I have been keeping close relationships with the Japanese developer community. Shared learnings and updates in Japanese. Whenever they visit Microsoft’s Redmond campus, we meet and share the latest exciting updates on MR projects and voice from Tokyo HoloLens meetup.
Presentation at AltspaceVR
Presented MRTK and my stories on personal HoloLens projects in AltspaceVR. https://altvr.com/what-is-mixed-reality/
Community Feedback
Engaging with community through Twitter and blog articles.
MRTK v2 (RC1) for HoloLens 2 Release
“Rather than show off a commercial-style demo of the device and its software at work, Park’s video gives us a refreshingly no-frills, first-person view of how the system truly performs via Microsoft’s open source Mixed Reality Toolkit (MRTK) hand interaction component.”
“Some of the examples include pressing relatively small virtual buttons, as well as well playing a piano keyboard. Sure, we saw the keyboard demo on stage, but seeing it from a first-person point of view gives you more of a sense of just how precise the HoloLens 2 really is.”
“The video’s demonstration of articulated hand input is so impressive that, if you’re not among the few who have used the unreleased HoloLens 2, you might wonder if the demo is enhanced in any way. Allow me to erase any doubt: This is exactly how the HoloLens 2 looks and performs in real time, from low latency interactions to the responsiveness of virtual objects when met with natural hand interactions.”
Next Reality
