RSA Boards

Our App intention and Summary

features of the app:

give people different environments to relax in. 
Using the binaural 3D sound, we can give the illusion of a 3D space, larger than the one that they might currently be in. Using this you can create an immersive environment by having things passing near the users ears. 
we also wanted to input an interactive element by having the scenes change slightly inside when breathing becomes controlled. 

scene example: City Scape
A distant hum of the city itself, people going about their daily lives. Traffic, Overhead distant planes, Boats passing on river, seagulls.
interactive elements:
When your breathing is steady and controlled the loud traffic shall dissipate, the weather in the scene shall improve  and the sun will come out. Breathing steady will slowly make the environment quitter and in turn more relaxing, things shall become more distant, planes in the sky shall pan from ear to ear as will boats on the river. 

how this achieves the aim of the brief:

Our app hits the brief because it cultivates peace of mind, and creates the right environment to possibly make people have an experience of transcendence. It also targets people who would normally not practice anything spiritual because of time constraints in their life, therefore opening up spiritual practice to more people. 

The summary of our idea is as follows:

THE AIM

Create something to help people engage in spiritual practise.

THE QUERY

Why are people not currently engaging in spiritual practice?

How do we change this?

RESEARCH
We did some data gathering and found that the main reasons was that people didn't have enough spare time to use to relax or spend doing nothing, a shortage of personal space to create the right environment, and a lack of understanding about what you have to do to be spiritual.

OUR SOLUTION
Use binaural 3D sound app to give people a virtual space to be spiritual in, which can be used even when there are lots of people around. This would make it perfect for use when travelling or at any other period when 'downtime' occurs.


TARGET AUDIENCE
Busy professionals, or anyone spending lots of time travelling that can use it when on the train or bus. 

Menu Showcase

This is a video we created to show how the menu system in our app is easy and simple to use. 

This is a video we created to show how each scene may behave once that a person has relaxed their breathing. 

Keep on moving

This is what we want our logo to look like whilst in movemnt.

This is how we want the app to behave when turned.

This is the logo of the app that will appear on start-up, the logo will stay on the screen un-till the screen is tapped. 

This video shows how no matter which way the device is, the apps scenes will always face the user. 

This is what we imagine the app to look like when it has been started up, clicked on, then a scene is selected. 

Planning it out.

We had our meeting with Johnny the other day, it went well. He liked our idea, seeing the potential of an app that can take your mind to other places. However there are still a few minor things that need to be addressed. In order to make sure we have the users full attention and involvement, we want to ensure the user is engaging with the product, almost being made spiritual without even knowing it. One idea is to use the bluetooth headset of a phone, to control the breathing of a user. The more controlled their breathing, the calmer the scene may get. This could almost make our app into a fun game the requires the smallest amount of attention while demanding the users full attention.

We believe that if an app controls how someone is behaving, it may be very successful. It will be a fun, relaxing, spiritual way of engaging the user, rewarding them with a greater experience as they obey the spiritual guidelines of the app.

This is a quick storyboard of how we imagine the app to be used. As mentioned before, we want the app to be as simple to use as possible, we want to relieve stress, not cause it through an overly complicated menu system. We also are aware our target market is busy people, people who don't have the time to normally perform spiritual activities. We want the app to look sleek and sexy, not like a stereotypical spiritual app, this is because we don't want people to be driven away by their view of spirituality.      

After some more logo design and development, we have decided to go with the cloud logo as it fits in best with our app. 

Thinking relaxed

In order to come up with a relaxing interface for our app we need to address some problems that may arise in the development process. The first problem is, in order for the app to flow well, it needs a easy to use interface in order the app it the lull people into a state of willing relaxation, before they even listen to the binaural 3D events. We hope to achieve this through a simplistic design that is colour coded.

The colours we believe should be used for our app are lighter, softer and generally easy on the eyes. 

This is the type of colour pallet we want, not too many colours but just enough for a distinctive interface. We're still wondering what shape to make these icon, whether to have them floating or not and if there is need for writing on these icons or just a sound preview. 

These are some icons we've created of places we personally find relaxing. It uses the colour pallet we previously selected, to show the user where they will be taken to. We believe this may be the best way to present our environments, the text will not be present as to add an air of mystery to the app. All the icons will have moving properties, when clicked the icon shall take up the full screen. We intend for the app to be quite dark as one again, it add a state of mysteriousness and relaxation.

  

This is just a quick low quality button test we decided to do. 

We have a name... Drumroll please.

After thinking hard about what we wanted to call our app we realised it was a lot harder to come up with a name, for two reasons. Reason one was that there are a LOT of apps out there with various names already taken. Reason two was that it's just hard to come up with a catchy name.

So we took to the thesauraus website in search for other ways to say, Spiritual, Transport and Holiday. Eventually after a lot of search we came across utopia and decided to call in YOUtopia because our app  is going to be more personal... however it was already taken.

Back to the drawing board we went, eventually settling on Envisage. This words means "to form a mental image of; visualize; contemplate" which is exactly what we intend our app to do.