Sports is a highly emotional experience, fans get VERY involved. The excitement of going to a live Sports event is HUGE. For the fans watching the game at home, how can we bring this excitement and this emotional engagement into their living room? Being a sports fan is also an incredibly SOCIAL experience — you go to the game with your friends, you’re  part of the crowd, you suffer through the ups and downs with them. It’s that SOCIALITY of sports that brings fans together, and is such a huge part of being a sports fan.

Sports fans have to navigate increasingly complex solutions to find and watch their favorite sports content across numerous n-screen experiences, where and when they are. We identified over 100 opportunities for us to explore. In envisioning the future of SSE, we wanted to enable a highly social sports experience, engage fans viscerally as well as by meeting their needs & wants, and take the Samsung Sports Experience outside of Living Room TV viewing towards a mobile, in-stadium, on-the-go experience.

I art-directed and produced the following vision video for executive review.

Soon after the 1st Samsung Gear watch went on sale, and before Apple Watch and ApplePay were announced, I led design on a project tasked to provide a point of view and proof of concepts for the vision of wearables and the Gear line. Wearables are expensive, yet provide only a few features. They are less customizable to user needs or contexts. 

We envisioned a suite of attachable trackers, bluetooth buttons, and modular wearable systems that let the user choose features that mattered most to them. We wanted this system to be easy, both to use, store and charge. We wanted to make sure that we only designed modular charms that people would use daily, and not only for a few hours like with a fitbit-type tracker. Project charm sought to marry the changing hourly needs of users with having to purchase different devices to meet those needs. We also heard other pain points from user testing such as the hassle of charging those multiple devices. 

Working with another engineer, we both built prototypes while I led all of the UX/UI design, industrial design, branding, storytelling and documentation materials.

A major win for this project was an acquisition of LoopPay by Samsung 6 months after seeing my design and prototype that employed a hacked LoopPay to demonstrate a shopping scenario. This project and acquisition led to Samsung's wireless payment strategy in phones and wearables today.

Pine Cone was a 6-month project I proposed and led. I was responsible for all design, prototyping, storytelling and executive presentations. Pine Cone was a "seed" project under a greater initiative to envision the future of the smart home combined with a Samsung smart agent (think Jarvis from Iron Man).

Early-adopted smart home and IoT products like fitbit, nest, august capitalized on the app-centric world we live in. These Smart Home products required phones to be handy, apps became siloed with disparate experiences, and the majority lacked multi-user interfaces. They also almost always ignore context and location in the home.

I proposed that the wall switches in our homes have been ignored in the IoT story, and that they could be an area rich for exploration and disruption. Take the wall switch's pain points today: single purpose and unaware of you, interfaces not reactive, fail to inform.

I developed all of the UX, UI, prototyping and assisted with user studies for this proof of concept.

Live event & location-based social media AR viewfinder.

Imagine sitting in the nose bleed section and an important play occurs at the opposite end of the field in the stadium you are currently at. You hold up your mobile device as a view finder, and can watch in real time people posting, tweeting, sharing photos and comments about that exact play. Since you only care to see things from that very location, only images and posts from that specific GEOGRAPHIC location in the stadium are shown in your view on your device’s display.

WJH: Your very own live-action interpreter.

A way to pause a live event (like a sports game) and get contextual real-time information displayed on screen. Example: A controversial play just occurred at first base. You say “WJH?” and the TV minimizes the live game and brings up relevant info about that exact moment in time, the play, the players, the rules, and an social media buzz about that play. ALL IN REAL TIME—and not minutes, or hours later.

Projector-Embedded Smart Displays

Imagine being able to get extra content while watching a live sports game, a movie, or favorite TV show—and have it all projected on the available space NEXT to your TV. Your TV would calibrate for the available space automatically so if an obstruction like a lamp, plant, or wall was in the way, the interface would adapt to the available space. Content can be projected above or below or to the sides of the main display. It could even be projected on the ground, like when you’re playing a video game standing in front of the TV.

Detect when I leave my show or game, and resume when I come back.

Imagine if your TV could know if you got up to get a snack or head to another room in your house during a commercial break. Maybe your lights in your bathroom dim a couple times like they do at the opera or ballet when the performance is about to resume. Imagine if your house could warn you that the show, movie or game is about to resume and you better get back, or pause if it you’re not and auto resume when you are ready and facing the TV? Yeah, they don’t do that today.