Imagining the political debate coverage in XR

Spring of 2020, I was lucky enough to participate in the NYC Media Lab's Spatial News Challenge with the New York Times R&D Lab, alongside my teammate Lydia Jessup. We set out to imagine a networked, augmented reality interface for watching political debates. Our application would allow you to unite your debate watching party onto a digital interface – in our case, an iPad application – where you could express and see reactions to the debate as it happened. We prototyped our application using Unity, and created a Google Realtime DB to store data from the interactions. Because the pandemic had hit as we were working on this project, we were able to test out the networking in a real-life scenario that served as a good use case for us.

This is an initial interaction design proposal I mocked up in Illustrator based on our brainstorming (click to enlarge):


You can see our final presentation for NYC Media Lab below: