Aniden x Baker Hughes

BACKGROUND

Baker Hughes enlisted Aniden Interactive to create an engaging way to expose new employees and trainees to their rich history. We set out to create a unique experience for the lobby space of their Western Hemisphere Education Center located in Houston Texas.

The touch-table project was expansive on all levels, with data spanning over 102 years of industry, business, and technology highlights. The interactive display was a whopping 16 feet by 3 feet (that's 7680 pixels x 1080 pixels), truly allowing users to immerse themselves in an adaptive, multi-user, two-sided interaction that actively drew people in.

Company
Aniden Interactive

Client
Baker Hughes

Teammates
David Chien (Design Director & Back-end)
Trevor Farella (UI)
Young Zhao (Front-end Dev)

Timeline
12 weeks

PROCESS

After meeting with the client, I took to my sketchbook and drew out a bore-hole in profile with branches for the timeline points, then a touchable DNA strand. I was tasked with the overall design, making sure all the individual elements would come together into a whole piece. I also provided gerenal UX around environnment/context and touch interactions, pairing with the other teammates. Check out one of the elements I prototyped.

Large scale touch surfaces are problematic and a number usability reviews had to happen to refine the experience. Adjustments to the design were made to accomodate the environnmental lighting and traffic flow.

RESULTS

David and Trever flew down to Houston, TX and installed the table in the Western Hemisphere Education Center. It was joined by a multi-panel vertical screen that ran a looping video designned to compliment the ambient movements captured in table.

The entire experience was wrapped up into a tiny Chrome App that was loaded onto the OS that ran the table and made to be serviced remotely by our team in Sunnyvale, CA.

LEARNINGS

I learned a lot about a technology most designers don't get to explore. It required me to look at the code libraries that drive the touch sensors to understand how individual gestures should be designed. This was my second foray into environmental design but in this project I learned about designing for glare and viewing angles.