Coral Club

This project explores how physical common space within student accommodation can be embedded with localised augmented reality activities to create a hybrid digital and physical collocated experience.
Tool Used
Figma, Miro, Adobe Aero
Team
Alison Liu, Cedric Jiang, Geer An, Henry Derek, Kimberley Yi
Timeline
Sept. 2021-Dec. 2021

At-A-Glance

Coral Club is a collaborative world-building activity located in the common room of a student accommodation where students build an AR aquarium environment while interacting with other residents. Coral Club was designed to explore how we can promote collaborative interactions within AR environments involving hybrid - digital and physical objects.
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This project is a class project awarded in Snap Creative Challenge 2021. I participated in every phase of the project.
01 / Context
02 / Problem
03 / Kickoff
04 / Research
05 / Persona
06 / Ideation
07 / User Flow
08 / Prototyping
01 / Context

Why Student Accommodation?

Student accommodation plays a unique role in college life. They are "home" for the students new to the city and are host to many life experiences from making friends, learning to live independently and potentially cohabitating with strangers for the first time. Many studies on students' sense of belonging show that positive social interaction is one of the essential elements for the sense of belonging and success in student life.
02 / Problem

Problem

Common rooms in student accommodations are social spaces, but the design of the common rooms doesn't make starting a conversation with new people easier.
The Challenge
How can AR technology improve the social experience in the common room to more interactive and enjoyable?
Research Goals
The research goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of implementing AR technology in a residential social space to improve residents' engagement and interaction. The objectives are to:
  • Identify residents' needs and pain points related to social interaction and engagement within the residential space.
  • Evaluate the potential of AR technology to address these needs and pain points.
  • Test the effectiveness of AR technology in improving residents' engagement and interaction in the social space.
  • Analyze the data collected to determine the impact of AR technology on residents' engagement and interaction in the social space.
03 / Kickoff

Observations in the common room

  • Common rooms in 4 different residence halls
  • Analysis method: A.E.I.O.U Framework
Since all of our team members live in student accommodations, we decided to do field observations in the common rooms in our own accommodation separately. We then shared our observations with each others and used an A.E.I.O.U Framework to analyse our finding. After the discussion, we decided to focus on activities, pain points and objectsWe drafted an online survey based on our observations and distributed it to students through the WhatsApp group chats within four student accommodations.
We drafted an online survey based on our observations and distributed it to students through the WhatsApp group chats within four student accommodations.
04 / Research

Online survey to get more information?

As we wanted to get more data from our target users quickly and to avoid leading users' answers by putting what we have already known so far into the answer options, we build a survey with mostly open questions. However, we can only get 17 responses, even though we sent out our survey in student's whatApp group chats that had the potential to reach more than 1000 people.  We revised our research plan and plan to conduct individual interviews for deeper understanding of users.
What do student residents say?
Semi-structured interviews provided us with more detailed representations of interactions and needs in the accommodation and insights into how AR may be integrated into the common room. Seven interviews were conducted, and the results were analysed with a deductive thematic coding method.
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Insights from interviews:
  • Information sharing: Participants want to know more about the events, activities and people live in the same building.
  • Networks for friendships: Participants want to make friend with their neighbours.
  • Sense of belonging: Participants wants to build a sense of belonging within the student accommodation that perceived it as a home not just a place to live.
05 / Persona

Meet Lucas & Sinead

Lucas represents users that want to build a sense of belonging in the student accommodation. For example, making new friends and have someone to cook and share life in the dormitory together. Sinead is our secondary persona that focus on getting more information from the resident hall since she usually miss events and activities in the hall that provides opportunities to make new friends.
06 / Ideation

Design Goals

  • make casual social interactions between co-located students in student accommodation more joyful and engaging.
  • Eliminate social barriers among students with different backgrounds via interactive AR product.
Crazy 8 be crazy
In order to explore the opportunity of design, we conducted first round of crazy 8 activities , trying to find out ideas that are more novel, and joyful with AR technology. After the discussions with team members, we found that if we want to deal with the information sharing pain point, we need to take the privacy issue into consideration. Therefore, we decided to focus on creating instant fun for user when interacting with other users and think about the potential to build a sense of belonging during these interactions.
We then did second round of crazy 8 to further explore design possibilities.
Crazy 8 - second round
The second round of crazy gave us a bunch of ideas that more focus on our design goals, wacky, inspirational, innovative and imaginative.
Extrating Ideas
We created a list of criteria to examined our ideas in order to find the most suitable ideas and move to developing phase. After four rounds of examination, the spotlights goes to the idea of virtual pet in the common room and the virtual ocean building activities.
What can happened in the common room
We created several story boards to sketch out the interactions that can happened within the common room with AR technology, and figure out the mechanism that can lead a playful experience that brings students residents together. An idea of student building underwater world with corals and fish while collaborating with each other was chosen to be our key interaction and we wanted to further test this idea.
07 / User Flow

User Flow

08 / Prototyping

Board Game Prototyping & Game Mechanism Testing

After lots of conversations with our story board, we decided to design a board game to test our idea. The board game prototype is to simulate the game mechanism in AR. We first used a dynamic iteration approach that we played the game within our team, discuss and iterate.
Later, we ran a usability test aimed at answering a few questions about our interaction mechanism:
  • Does coral pairing activities encourage social interaction between students?
  • What motivates participants to continue with (or complete) the fish collecting task?
  • What playing strategies are adopted by users? How can we design for these strategies?
Our participants naturally start conversation with each other to talk about the strategies of pairing corals in order to get the fish they want, which is good that our goal for the game is to help users to start conversation without pressure. As the game design, we originally designed a points system, which users will get the corresponding points when they get a fish. However, we observed that the point system impeded users collaboration of collecting different fish to flourish marine animals collection, which was design to make users feel that they are in the same team and have the same goal in this game (sense of belonging).
We did a second run of testing that remove the point system. This time, we found that users would collaborate with each other to find out the best way to collect all the fish listed on the paper.
AR prototyping
After finalise the game mechanism, we created an AR prototype using Adobe Aero to test the game flow with users under AR condition.
Video prototyping

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Copyright 2025 © Cindy Huang
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