Mixed Reality Scripting for Storyboards

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When working in new and emerging media, the process is as important as the work, the idea or experience itself. As a creator, ideator, strategist or account and project manager, it's important to know how to approach Mixed Reality and what are the changes that have taken place over the years. The good part is if you have worked extensively for many years with UX Designers, filmmakers or storyboard artists it will be easy for you to align your process to theirs or even learn to work the way they do. You can even study the process and create your own. Whatever helps you to create a digital creative project lifecycle for your team and you.

What is Mixed Reality?

When your ideas make real and virtual worlds collide, you get mixed reality. Whether you're working in AR or VR, with physical or digital objects, visualizations, interfaces, interactions or environments you will often find yourself in a world where there exist both physical and digital points and objects. It is a hybrid mixture of worlds both physical and virtual sort of like a layer or interface. Some also define it as a middle ground between reality, virtual reality and augmented reality.

Your Team or Development Partner is your Partner in Progress

Before your idea goes from paper prototype to a computer prototype to an actual version, it's very important to sync with your Design and Development partner without whom your idea will never see the light of day. To ensure this, you need to make sure you have several brainstorms, workshops or calls especially if you are working remotely with multidisciplinary teams or a single diverse unit.

Creative Priorities for Scripting

It may seem like a storyboard or just another script but your script has to be more of a short guiding and relatable conversation with a little bit of the right tonality, craft and creativity.

Use Case

What exactly is the vision and desired outcome? What exactly is the idea doing? What are the situations?

Input and Output

At what point will there be an input? What is the output it results in? Hence, where is the copy, content or navigational conversation required?

Spatial and Environment Mapping

What has your UX partner planned? What is their vision? This becomes crucial as the project moves along and you get to see the very first explorations, locations, positioning in mixed reality.

How immersive is the experience being created?

Is it linear, non-linear? Is it a hologram or a game? Is it a guide or a demo? Accordingly you can decide where to place questions, phrases, instructions, navigational content or floating texts and supers.

Old methods for new experiences

In my experience, the best way to edit, write for or make the script go through a content approval workflow is to use a variety of methods right from simple post-its alongside the script to card sorting and even an IA all manually put up on a big board along with your UX team's visual user journey. This sets the stage for corrections, for quality assurance and checks and you can use the prints as a handy guide during the actual testing with your development team.

Actual Mixed Reality Storyboard made with my UX and Design team partners for our project. True collaboration makes the project advance at every step of the way.

Using simple posts its or card sorting allows the Content and Digital team to categorize elements, features, functions, interactions and also ready the script for a multi-level approval process.