How to Delete a Couch
An idea for leveraging existing mobile UI patterns to enhance user experience for augmented reality applications.
As more companies begin creating experiences in Augmented Reality, we see more and more rudimentary “pick and place” apps that allow a user to place a model of an object into their real world.
While this does a great job of giving them the impression that the (couch / dancing donut / cactus wearing sunglasses) is in their physical space, the concept of deletion in real space isn’t an interaction with a pre-existing pattern. Existing applications tend to be clunky (a big X button on the couch) or overly playful (shoot the couch to smithereens with an AR ray gun).
There’s always a lot of work to be done creating new patterns for new interaction spaces, but we think in this case there’s a simple way to utilize an existing mobile user interface pattern for AR.
Here’s one idea: Press-and-hold on a virtual object to pull that object out of AR space and back into two-dimensional space before allowing it to be deleted.
This interaction is simple, lightweight, and allows us to take advantage of existing UI patterns for deletion (e.g. Instagram Stories, Facebook Chat Heads).
Plus, it mimics the desired effect of removing the item from the real world.
