HoloLens & Mixed Reality

In my first role at Microsoft, I led all the aesthetic aspects of Windows Holographic from incubation to the final visual guidelines, which our team used to ship the first edition of HoloLens. I was also involved with the early design direction and development of Microsoft's Virtual Reality experience on Windows 10.

Both of these efforts involved spearheading a series unique experiential and aesthetic prototyping efforts, as well as providing creative direction for user interface designs, motion behavior and sound design of the holographic operating system. Ultimately, much of this work ended up greatly defining both the functionality of the OS, as well as the branding cues utilized in communication and storytelling.

Additionally, I have led the incubation and design for a variety of future technologies and experiences within mixed reality, one of which graduated into the evolution of Microsoft's visual design language and its manifestation across many consumer experiences. Another one of such investigations led to the development of Microsoft's Virtual Reality offering.

While I cannot share much of the work I did during this experience (due to confidentiality agreements), I collected some samples of what has been made public to date.

Image: My colleague Paul Bosveld wearing one of the first HoloLens prototypes

Exploded view rendering of HoloLens Developer Edition

Conceptual video celebrating the new HoloLens Holographic Processing Unit 2.0

Sensors in Microsoft HoloLens enable people to directly interact with and manipulate Holograms. For us designers. this meant a whole new interaction method that continues to send shockwaves throughout the UX community, particularly as we continued to advance the modality of interaction, allowing direct hand manipulation where users can touch holograms directly as opposed to interacting from a distance.

An animated sample illustrating the visual feedback my team and I designed for the HoloLens UI.

The age of holograms

I my role as creative director for HoloLens’ product aesthetic, I also had the opportunity to direct some of our public demos and on-stage presence.

This TED talk by HoloLens inventor Alex Kipman was one of such moments. It was created in close partnership between internal teams at Microsoft and Tendril Studio.

Thank you!

Thanks to all my colleagues for partnering to dream-up, design and build the world’s first holographic computer together. My 5-year journey with you all in building HoloLens 1, 2 and Windows Mixed Reality was one of my most memorable moments at Microsoft.

Thanks to all of my internal and external partners for creating some really exciting product demos and films to advance our roadmap plans and share our thinking with our customers.