Country Pick 2017 / / Student

Oculus

• Company
  Savannah College of Art and Design, United States
• Lead Designer
  Meghan Preiss, Blake Stephenson, Torin Melville, Jacob Kleinman, Anne Pascale
• Design Team
  Meghan Preiss Blake Stephenson Torin Melville Jacob Kleinman Anne Pascale
• Project Link
  view
• University
  Savannah College of Art and Design

Our Team wastasked to redesign the Digital
SLR Camera in our human factorsclass. While
researching digital SLR cameraswe found that
we were limiting and pigeonholing ourselves.
We went through two weeks for ethnographic
primary research as well as secondary
research. This lead us to a week of ideation and
four weeks of prototyping and market testing.
We were trying to design the handle and the
viewport, yet we were missing the real problem
with digital SLR cameras. The user of the
camera has to completely remove themselves
from a moment to capture it. The user is rarely
in photographs and rarely experiences the true
beauty of the moment or place. After seven
weeks of working with the typical digital SLR
camera, our team decided to go back to
research and ideation but with a different
mindset and problem to solve. We found that
Oculus derived from our team’s love for
adventure and capturing moments. We began
to research drones, and interviewing extreme
athletes like free climbers and kite surfers to
understand what kind of documentation they
would like as well as what kind of control and
time they have to take themselves out of the
moment to capture it. We took all of our
research, affinitized it, and arrived at three
opportunities. We decided to take all three
opportunities and create Oculus. A thrust-
vectored panoramic camera.