Immersive Experience · Climate Tech · 2024
Carbon Project Virtual Tour
A virtual storytelling experience that helps buyers understand carbon projects through an interactive field journey.
Overview
Project overview
Carbon Project Virtual Tour replaces costly, slow on-site visits with guided, AI-assisted virtual walkthroughs — so distributed teams can assess sites together, remotely.
01
The problem
Physical site visits were expensive, slow to schedule, and hard to share. By the time stakeholders aligned, conditions had often changed.
02
My role
I designed the product experience: the walkthrough interaction model, AI annotation flows, and the collaborative review layer, prototyping heavily to de-risk novel interactions.
03
Who we designed for
Field engineers, project leads, and remote stakeholders who need shared, accurate context to make confident go/no-go decisions.
04
Research
- Ride-alongs on 4 real site visits to map the current workflow.
- Wizard-of-Oz tests for AI-generated annotations.
- Concept testing on spatial navigation patterns.
- Trust & explainability interviews around AI suggestions.
05
Key insights
Users trusted AI annotations only when they could verify the source.
Orientation was the hardest part of any virtual space.
Shared, persistent comments mattered more than live presence.
Decisions stalled without a clear 'what changed since last time'.
06
Design decisions
Always-oriented navigation
A persistent mini-map and guided paths so users never feel lost in the virtual space.
Explainable AI annotations
Every AI insight links to its source frame and confidence, keeping humans in control.
Asynchronous collaboration
Threaded, location-anchored comments and a change-log so teams align across time zones.
07
Final solution
An immersive yet legible interface where AI does the heavy lifting — spotting issues and drafting notes — while people stay firmly in the decision seat.
Impact
The impact
−50%
On-site visits required
3×
Faster stakeholder alignment
92%
Found AI notes trustworthy
Reflection
What I learned
- AI earns trust through explainability, not magic — sourcing every suggestion was non-negotiable.
- For novel interactions, prototyping early saved months of misalignment.
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