Chinese user spends about 3.1 billion hours per day on mobile applications in average.
People look at their phones every 6.5 minutes, 150 times a day on avegrage.
The average daily WeChat use time per user is as high as 90 minutes.
I haven’t tried, but I want to try. I want to send some radical emotions, or things in life that are inappropriate to talk to people around me. I also don’t want the other party to reply, but I want to confirm that the other party has received and read it.
Numbers speak louder than words
All interviewees spent more than 3 hours per day on social medias. The most popular social media is WeChat, a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent.
All interviewees had undergone social media fatigue. All of them had thought about uninstalling social media and some of them had taken actions.
Most of the interviewees said they had the experience of sending messages or writing letters to strangers. And others expressed willingness to try.
All interviewees had experience in writing letters. When asked about the difference between writing a letter and sending a message, 3 people mentioned that "writing a letter is more thoughtful than sending a message", and 3 people said that "writing a letter is more ritualistic".
In order to understand how users spend their time on social media apps, and under what circumstances did they undergo social media fatigue, as well as their rate of acceptance of writing letters to strangers, I designed the following interview questions and randomly interviewed 8 young people from different places.
People are bound by information in their lives, and are coerced into receiving too much information, so much that one person can’t handle it. I hope to design a way of communication that is different from the current social media app, so that people can temporarily get out of the sea of information and have a moment of tranquility in the information age. The AR drift bottle app will be designed around the following core features: anonymity, socialization, and visual diversity.
I want to design an anonymous social media app like “drifting bottle” and enhance its interactivity and visual richness through AR technology.
There are 3 major functions of this application. The first one is finding the locations where users can pick up their bottle (or exchange a new one), and then users can connect their bottles with their account. The second function is reading AR letters, which are chosen randomly from the library. Users scan the code on their bottle and see the AR display through their devices. The third function is sending letters. There are two types of messages: video/image/audio messages and text messages. Users can include pre-designed 3D decorations (such as emoji) to messages. While users can not communicate with each other directly, the application do support actions such as mark as read/send kudos/add to collection. The senders will receive notifications of their messages being read/send kudos/add to collection.
I developed the AR section of this application through the Unity engine. I added animations to the 3D objects, for example I added an “open” animation to the letter objects so that as soon as users click on the letter object the animation will show.
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