When your Butt is Big, Every Seat is a Comfy Seat
Once upon a time, I was in shape. I spent a few years training and competing in bikini fitness competitions. I took home a couple medals, everyone had a good time.
These days, I still spend time lifting heavy weights in the gym. I go to the university gym, where I feel like a real dinosaur around undergrads, and notice something I have seen in every gym I have entered — people nervous in the weight room.
The weight room of any gym can be intimidating to beginners, and understandably so with beefy men grunting loud enough to rip their buttholes. I have also noticed a growing trend of people wanting to build bigger glutes in general, but lacking the knowhow on exercises.
My solution? How might we teach beginners in the weight room how to lift weights to build bigger butts. That’s right, bigger BUTTS. Why? Because every seat is a comfy seat when you have a lot of cushion on the backside.
So, I actually went through a leg day at the gym and snapped some jank photos and Photoshopped glasses, and lifting directions (in the glasses) to show the process.
I would like to prototype and/or build a functional AR asset for glute & hamstring day at the gym with the hopes of it working as a set of workout glasses eventually. I believe that glasses such as these can not only help guide people in the weight room, but also can encourage proper form so that people don’t injure themselves.
I anticipate the biggest challenge to be actually getting the AR elements to work how I envision them. After seeing work like Yoon Park’s “Typing in Space”, I think it will also be a challenge knowing what to show on the AR glasses and how big/small/non-invasive to make text and pictures.
This project is one that I have started the branding on, and one that I would love to add to my portfolio (see a couple of brand elements below):
For this project, the resources and skills I will be using include sort of “puppeteering” the project by taking more photos of a leg day at the gym, which helps me know what sort of content to include as I go through. Then, making up some prototype elements in Illustrator/Photoshop to give a good visual of what I am trying to achieve. Finally, I would like to get into Spark AR to demonstrate how and what will show up through lenses of the glasses.
I have high hopes for a high fidelity prototype, but with my lack of access to AR glasses, I think the highest fidelity would be video examples of Spark AR being used at the gym on a mobile device.
I still need to do research about AR in general, and the content people show with it & how. I also need to do some research about lifting for beginner pointers and language so that I generate the content for anyone to use (especially beginners). My biggest question is HOW does one make AR glasses actually work. Why can’t I? Is it lack of access? Probably.
