D. A. Terre
Interaction designer | Experience engineer

Photo of a woman with Spacetop on her lap, seeing multiple windows and apps open around her while wearing the dedicated AR glasses

Spacetop

Spacetop is the world's first AR laptop, built for productivity and deep focused work.

Wearing the AR glasses, users see a dynamic canvas surrounding them, on which they can open windows and tabs with Gmail, Slack, Notion, Office 365 or any other standard web apps, and arrange them into comfortable and beautiful layouts.

With practically zero learning curve, Spacetop builds on our natural human relationship with space to reduce the clutter and overhead that comes with managing a lot of content on a tiny screen. It provides a consistent, familiar workstation anywhere you go, with all your content exactly where you left it: only a glance away.

As Director of Interaction at Sightful, I lead the design, research and engineering of the interactive aspects of the product:

  • The core interaction paradigms: phsycial (how content tracks and moves with the device, how it responds to the environment) as well as digital: how trackpad and keyboard combine with novel interactions such as hand gestures.
  • It's smart, intuitive and delightful tiling 3D window system for context-driven layouts that reduce clutter and promote healthy, focused work.
  • The system UI structure, its layers, their roles and mechanics: how dialogs work, where do notifications pop up, how is input focus communicated, etc.
  • The developer experience of building apps that use all of the above while living in harmony with other apps in users' carefully built layouts.

My role involves a lot of hands-on work alongside my team of UX engineers. We work with product managers and designers to conceptualize, rapidly prototype and test interactions and interfaces in AR. Then we integrate with the engineering teams to build the experience-critical infrastructure that is required to support them - with special attention given to input latency, rendering quality, and scalability.

Client

Sightful

Date

2023

Tags

ux design, interaction design, coding, unity, ar/vr/xr
Product shot of Spacetop Early Access
Photo of a woman using Spacetop on an airline flight, with multiple windows and apps open around her
Animation of Spacetop's canvas distance interaction in action