Role

Project Lead

Product Design

UI/UX Design

User Research

Storyboarding

Team

Po-yu Chen

Erin Tolleson

Fay Ma

Meiyao Li

Timeline

Jan 2025 - March 2025

11 weeks

11 weeks

Instructed By

Bridget Weis

Li-Yuan Chiou

Haipei Chen

Tools

Figma

Blender

After Effect

FINAL PITCH VIDEO

FurReal. is an AR pet simulator that prepares prospective owners through gamified, hands-on experience.

FurReal. is an AR pet simulator that prepares prospective owners through gamified, hands-on experience.

| CONTEXT

Pets come with real responsibilities.

Over 23 million American households adopted pets for companionship while working from home. However, many underestimated the long-term responsibilities of pet ownership, which requires consistent care and dedicated attention–feeding, grooming, exercise, and social interaction.

Pet ownership requires consistent care and dedicated attention–feeding, grooming, and social interaction.

Rushed adoptions often result in unintentional neglect, mistreatment, or even abandonment. As a result, many prospective pet owners now hesitate, unsure if they can provide quality care and commitment.

| CHALLENGE

Pet care isn't one-size-fits-all.

While beginner guides are accessible, they has low generalizability, lacking hands-on experience and personalization. Without a way to practice real routines tailored to their lifestyle, prospective pet owners often feel unprepared and anxious about adoption.

| HMW STATEMENT

How might we prepare prospective pet owners for the time commitment, lifestyle adjustment, and emotional resilience before adopting a real pet?

How might we prepare prospective owners for the time commitment and lifestyle changes before real adoption.

| SOLUTION

An Experiential Learning Kit that Builds Routines

FurReal is a pet care experience simulator that offers gamified, interactive, and data-driven learning that adapts to each user’s needs. It helps prospective pet owners set realistic expectations, make informed decisions, and ease into pet parenthood in a spatially immersive environment.

What's Inside

01. AR Device

Analyze user inputs and surroundings through image recognition, enabling adaptive virtual pet behavior and personalize training insights.

Guide users through pet care tasks with real-time audio cues and step-by-step AR overlays.

02. Companion App

AR scanning remains functional on mobile interface, ensuring accessibility for all learners, with or without AR hardwares.

Leverage AI to generate personalized adoption insights. Motivate long-term engagement through gamification and progress tracking.

View Figma Prototype →

03. AR Stickers

To reinforce routine building and spatial awareness, we provide AR-recognizable stickers for stationary pet care items (e.g. food bowls, beds, litter areas).

To complete a pet care task, learners need to scan the sticker with AR glasses or phone, and perform corresponding hand gestures.

04. Pet Care Supplies

A subscription-based service with real pet care tools for hands-on practice, helping learners build muscle memories through AR-guided tutorials.

Partnering with pet suppliers, we deliver used-kits tailored to complex tasks like dog walking, grooming, and pet waste disposal, with a flexible return policy to ensure sustainability.

| ONBOARDING

Context-aware AI.

Context-aware AI

AI-powered pets recognize and interact with user's physical environment, making the simulation more immersive and practical.

By integrating AR with user's home setup, FurReal help users find the ideal feeding, sleeping, and play areas through trial and error.

AR Glasses Calibration

(1/3)

Step 1: Scan Living Space

Construct a spatial map allows FurReal to adapt pet behaviors to real-world obstacles, furniture, and room layouts.

Mobile Calibration

(2/3)

Step 2: AR Device Connection

Connects mobiles to AR glasses to enable real-time awareness of the pet's virtual presence across devices.

Render Visual Content

(3/3)

Step 3: Interactive AR Visualization

Install AR stickers to mark pet care stations. FurReal integrates 3D models and virtual pet with precise spatial awareness.

| COMPLETE A TASK

Gamification helps build habits.

Encourage consistent pet care with positive reinforcement, progress tracking, and real-time feedbacks, making responsible pet ownership second nature.

Task 1: Feeding Food Bowl

(1/5)

Step 1: Behavior Trigger (Mobile)

Push notifications nudge users to complete pet care tasks when they're not at home wearing AR glasses.

Task 1: Feeding Food Bowl

(2/5)

Step 2: Actionable AR Scenarios

Engage in hands-on, interactive tasks in a real-world environment. Replicate real pet care situations (e.g. administering medication, grooming, training, potty-walking) with real-time feedback.

Task 1: Feeding Food Bowl

(3/5)

Step 3: Reward Consistency XP

Step 3: Reward

Earn Consistency XP towards pet adoption readiness after task completion, gaining confidence in real-life pet ownership.

Earn Consistency XP towards pet adoption readiness after task completion, gaining confidence in real-life pet ownership.

Task 2: Play Fetch

(4/5)

Step 1: Behavior Trigger (AR)

Alternatively, users can receive task notification inside the AR device.

Task 2: Play Fetch

(5/5)

Step 2: Reward

Earn Bonding & Attention XP towards pet adoption readiness after task completion, gaining confidence in real-life pet ownership.

| ASSESSING READINESS

Progress Visualization.

Progress Visualization

FurReal provides a clear, tangible measure of pet adoption readiness, motivating consistent engagement and goal-setting as users progress towards adopting a pet.

Mobile Functionality 1

(1/3)

Step 1: Pet Care History

View history of nudges in four readiness metrics–consistency, bonding, hygiene, and health–identifying strengths and areas for improvement.

Mobile Functionality 2

(2/3)

Step 2: Adjust Settings

Toggle features on or off during the simulation. (e.g. disable training or random events if they cause stress, and this input will inform their future adoption decisions).

Mobile Functionality 3

(3/3)

Step 3: Adoption Insights

Based on spatial map, past AR interactions, and user preferences, generate adoption recommendations tailored to user's needs and circumstances.

| ADD-ON FEATURES

Set Realistic Expectations.

FurReal builds prospective owner's emotional resilience by preparing them for the unfiltered pet care realities.

Additional Feature 1

(1/2)

Random Events & training

Trigger unexpected events such as stealing food from the counter, biting furnitures, barking excessively at night. FurReal guide users step-by-step and educate them the root causes of these random events.

Additional Feature 2

(2/3)

Dog Walking (Location-Tracking)

Socialization with other dogs and potty walks are equally important for a dog's wellbeing. FurReal tracks their GPS to ensure users are indeed completing these task outdoor (not at their house!).

Additional Feature 3

(3/3)

Waste Disposal

Hygiene tasks like grooming, bathing are complex tasks that can benefit from step-by-step AR overlay tutorials and AI real-time feedback.

| CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

Understand the Problem Place

View Research Process on Desktop

To understand the pet industry and key challenges as non-pet owners, we conducted surveys and secondary research from online forums.

Our survey attracted over 50 participants, from which we selected 8 pet owners and 2 prospective owners—including students, employees, and a professional dog trainer—to identify patterns of pain point in first-time pet ownership.

Current Pet Owners

Q1: What did you wish you knew before getting the pet?

"Pet insurance takes lots of money, vet, vaccination… like adding a child to the family."

"…puppy are louder than expected…cried non-stop, bark constantly, pee everywhere…

"Inflexible lifestyle…hard to host sleepover or travel"

Prospective Pet Owners

Q2: What do you feel unprepared of?

"Am I at the right stage to bring a cat with me if I can’t be around it decent amount in a day?"

"I'm stressed about setting him up for failure (i.e. separation anxiety, not feeding him well enough)

"I don't want to making mistakes because I don't know any better"

Card Sorting

We then created a deck of 43 cards covering problematic behaviors, training methods, and body language for a training expert to validate, expand, categorize, and rank for effectiveness.

| THEMATIC ANALYSIS

Adoption ≈ Parenthood

01. Time-Commitment

Pets require daily care—feeding, grooming, exercise, and social interaction—which can be challenging for students and full-time workers.

02. Hands-on Experience

Aspiring pet owners worry about proper care, as beginner guides lack hands-on experience, leaving them anxious and uncertain.

03. Trial and Error

Experienced pet owners learn to interpret pet’s intentions through body language and sounds through trial and error. 

04. Training or Abuse?

Lack of space and unprepared owners can lead to misinterpreted pet behavior, unintentional neglect or mistreat pets due to inadequate readiness.

| IDEATION

There's no "Bad" Ideas

Phase 1: Rapid Ideation

Using pen and paper, we rapidly sketched 60+ potential solutions using Crazy Eights. Then, we evaluate them using Quadrant Analysis. For this stage, we prioritized getting all our ideas out–not letting perfectionism stifle our creativity.

Phase 2: Consolidate, Then Ideate Again

After sharing and discussing our ideas, we consolidated our ideas into recurring themes and evaluated them through the lens of pain-points we identified in our contextual inquiry.

We identified exciting opportunities to support novice pet owners with time-management, feeling unprepared, and complicated tasks like grooming and training. We decided to focus on solutions that educate users are prepare them for responsible pet care.

↘ Dog Walking & Waste Disposal (Realistic Expectation)

↘ Controller (Learn By Doing)

↘ Virtual Pet (Consistent Routine)

Phase 3: Downselecting

FurReal is an AR pet care simulator that helps prospective pet owners experience the realities of pet care through interactive, hands-on learning. Using a handheld controller that mimics a leash, grooming brush, and treat dispenser, users engage in daily tasks like refilling food, cleaning, and providing attention.

The app scans their living space to create a customized 3D map, integrating realistic interactions. FurReal also introduces random pet behaviors and chaos levels. Over time, users earn a readiness score, assessing their ability to meet pet care responsibilities.

Hannah's Critique

1. Think about scenarios, don't be too obsessed with new technologies (AR, IoT, AI, etc) 2. Holding a controller during dog walking doesn't feel natural & user might stop using it. 3. Be specific, design a tool kit for different pet care activity.

We eventually chose “FurReal”, as it only provides guidance for first-time or prospective pet owners, but also encourages hands-on learning through physical interactions, allowing users to learn by doing and experience the responsibilities of pet care firsthand.

| PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOP

Co-designing with stakeholders

To further develop FurReal, we invited a diverse group, including prospective pet owners and pet care experts to co-create solutions and gather valuable insights to inform our design.

Making

Participants loosely fill out their daily schedule, then modify it as if they just adopted a pet. This helped us understand the before-and-after impact of pet ownership, the difference between prospective owner's and experienced owners.

Acting

Participants engage with simulated dog walking using either mobile interface or AR glasses. Meanwhile, trigger random events such as dog running uncontrollably fast, jumping on passerby, or eating chocolate.

Telling

Participants randomly select from 8 scenario cards with unexpected events generated by AI using insights from user research. After reading these scenario cards, prospective pet owners will share honest reactions and decisions about pet adoptions.

Card
Card
Card
Card
Card
Card
Card
Card

Key Takeaways

Feedback revealed that the phone-controller setup felt cumbersome and limited visibility, prompting us to test more intuitive combinations. The final design opted for a phone + AR glasses + controller for a more ergonomic, immersive experience.

Chloe (Experienced Pet Owner) created a well-rounded schedule aligned with expert recommendations and found the AR glasses comfortable. She suggested a hold-and-release feature for controlling the AR dog, suggesting a more intuitive leash-like controller.

Cady (Prospective-Pet Owner) struggled with creating a complete care schedule, focusing on playtime while overlooking essential tasks like litter box cleaning. She found balancing pet care with school overwhelming.

Justin Portree's Feedback

1. Low confident users might consider AR glasses too tech savvy. 2. Balance ambition with feasibility, ensure we have a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) while striving for Minimum Lovable Prodict (MLP).

Our Response

I designed a companion app that has the same set of features as AR glasses (AR glasses is just an immersive enhancement)

| SELF-DIRECTED RESEARCH

Create grounded AR experiences

To design grounded AR solutions, I attended Hrvoje Benko’s DUB seminar, learning about Meta Reality Lab’s state-or-art AR glasses (Orion, Project Aria, contextual AI, hand input). 

Takeaways from Hrvoje Benko

1. Smart Glasses + Contextual AI + Hand Input = Immersive XR expriences
2. Project Aria: Meta Reality Lab's
3. The capability of state-of-art AR glasses (e.g. Orion)

Takeaways from Hrvoje Benko

1. Smart Glasses + Contextual AI + Hand Input = Immersive XR expriences 2. Project Aria: Meta Reality Lab's 3. The capability of state-of-art AR glasses (e.g. Orion)

Takeaways from Cody Char (Product Designer of Orion AR Glasses):

1. "In a science fair, you'd be attracted by interactive potatoes 🥔 rather than flat paper panels"

2. "Potatoes stands for versatile, intentional XR than encourage physical interactions with 3D objects. Put more potatoes in XR!"

Takeaways from Cody Char (Product Designer of Orion AR Glasses):

1. "In a science fair, you'd be attracted by interactive potatoes 🥔 rather than flat paper panels" 2. "Potatoes stands for versatile, intentional XR than encourage physical interactions with 3D objects. Put more potatoes in XR!"

I explored how AR technology works & bring knowledge back to our team to inform design executions!

| STORYBOARDS

Kids vs. Full-Time Workers

We highlighted the experiences of kids and full-time workers, both eager to own a pet but facing distinct challenges. While they share common anxieties—such as time management and readiness—their expectations and obstacles differ.

By exploring these contrasting perspectives, we designed FurReal to be adaptive to different learning curves, routines, and life stages.

Kids often romanticize pet ownership, underestimating daily responsibilities.

They may struggle with routine tasks like feeding and cleaning.

Full-time workers worry about balancing pet care with their busy schedules, often feeling guilty about leaving their pets alone for long hours.

They may struggle with giving pets enough attention and playtime.

Technical Storyboards

Bridget's Feedback

cut the mp3 to ~60 sec, cut caden (reduce variable lol), and focus on fay interact only two features: feeding & playing (30sec). Only the highlighted frames will be in the video, only include 3 brief shots of dog walking & training ("Leave It!"), which will be intuitive if we explain feeding & playing well, let people's imagination do the work for us.

| DEMO DAY

MAYOGOOOOOOSE

Made with love & tea & senyai :]

Want to visualize an idea? Let's bring it to life!
Mli1012@uw.edu

MAYOGOOOOOOSE

Made with love & tea & senyai :]

Want to visualize an idea? Let's bring it to life!
You can reach me at mli1012@uw.edu