Skype • Siddhant Mehta

My time at Skype was short, I spent 3 months before the team was re-structured and re-organized. While I was trying to find my place at Microsoft, I worked on a couple of projects related to capturing precious moments and exploring the VR space with a cross-endpoint communication fabric.

Capturing Moments

Goal:People spend billions of hours on Skype talking to loved ones, running small businesses, teaching music, connecting with students abroad and more. Previously, the only way to save those memories was to take screenshots manually, which were then lost on their individual devices. As a team, we wanted to help people capture and share those precious moments with each other.

Design Challenge: How do we make capturing moments a seamless experience? How do we help people build memories over time?

Skype Reactions in Mixed Reality (2017)

Communication fabric in VR: As part of an incubation team, we were tasked with exploring the most basic interactions and making them appealing for a virtual environment. Some of these included exploring emojis, reactions, virtual travel, 3d animations, spaces and more.

Head replacement

Cloud emojis

Particle emitters

Skype in Mixed and Virtual Reality Environments (2017)

Goal: Given that a majority of Skype users were on desktop and mobile clients, one of our objective was to explore ways in which we can provide them with a first-class participation experience in VR. We built Unity prototypes to test latency, control and camera movements from mobile to VR spaces.

Core questions:
- How would desktop and mobile users control what they see in VR?
- Can we use inside out tracking from mobile devices to give a sense of movement in the 6-DOF worlds?
- How would they travel together?
- How would the avatars share their spaces?