Manyone x GuardKnox - a mixed reality spatial installation

In 2021, I collaborated with Manyone to create an interactive mixed reality experience on HoloLens 2 for GuardKnox, an automotive technology company.

I took the project as a freelancer and was responsible for the core development, working together with a talented team of digital and spatial designers to craft the final product. After this project, I joined Manyone part-time as a developer in the emergent technology team.

We created a physical statue, used to automatically anchor the experience in space using Azure Object Anchors. Around this artefact we told a semi-interactive story that exposes the complex offering of the client in an engaging way.

The physical component underlying the virtual layer makes the experience more impactful and immersive - this was a core learning for us, and spatial experiences have been a big push in Manyone's work ever since.

A nice showcase of this project can be seen on Manyone's website.

Random notes on the process

I developed several interesting workflows while working on this project. The project was made in Unity, and runs on HoloLens, where the development experience is made easy using MRTK. However, for faster iterations, I created little tools for ourselves to edit things at runtime, with the help of some cool unity packages.

I worked with the Unity Timeline package to allow us to craft a semi-interactive storytelling experience. I developed the floating ball AI which is also semi interactive, in that it flies around with awareness of its virtual surroundings and the HoloLens wearer, while telling a semi-linear story that involves minigames and interactive episodes. I also did a lot of short iterations with playable prototypes and user testing during the process, which is a common practice in game development but was a pretty fresh discovery for the design agency world, allowing us to be agile, try a lot of stuff out, and make a polished experience in good time.

My schedule during the 4 months of the project's development was working for 3 weeks, then taking a week off each month, which was a first test of my current workflow of 2 weeks on - 2 weeks off. Splitting the work into weekly sprints and taking time off in between provides enough time to focus on deep tasks while allowing for more or less productive days, a process which I recommend for many reasons. At the end of the sprints it becomes natural to wrap up the current tasks and leave the project tidy, and this is a big deal for the stability of the project and the ease of documenting it during and after the process.

This project was completed in 4 months and was planned to be shown at CES 2022 but sadly that didn't happen due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the GuardKnox Hololens experience received a lot of praise from the client and their partners, and is still one of the more popular showcases in Manyone's portfolio.