ASUS ROG Core77 Design Awards Winner
ROG Spatium
- UX/Interaction Design
- XR Prototyping
- Unity Development
- Spatial Design
An XR streaming experience that reimagines how streamers and their audiences play together.
Spatium is an XR streaming system for ASUS’s Armoury Crate app. Four devices (an AR lens, a room sensor, a motion-tracking band, and object tags) turn a streamer’s room into a virtual space their viewers can decorate and send gifts into.
On a transdisciplinary team of 4, I owned the UX, concepting, interactions, and system design, from interviews with 6 MISFIT Gaming streamers to XR prototypes tested with 10+ users. ASUS bought the AniMe Matrix lid animations I designed in the studio’s first stage, and Spatium was a finalist for ROG to acquire. It later won a 2023 Core77 Design Award in Gaming.
If you’d like to learn more, get in touch.
The brief
Design for the future of gaming culture
ASUS ROG sponsored a 14-week ArtCenter studio around the ROG AniMe Matrix, and we worked directly with the ROG team throughout. It ran in three stages: new animations for the AniMe Matrix display on the laptop lid, then new hardware and interactions. The brief asked how street, pop, EDM, and underground culture will shape future gamers, and what new hardware and interactions ROG could build for them.
Opportunity
How might ASUS develop an ecosystem of tools that facilitates new interactions and experiences between streamers and their communities?
Challenge
A stream is built around one person on camera. Viewers can chat and tip, but they can’t shape the space the streamer plays in, even though connection with their audience is what streamers told us matters most.
Solution
Spatium, a kit of four devices and Armoury Crate software that turns a streamer’s room into an XR space viewers can decorate, gift into, and build with them.
Research · Challenge 01
Becoming more than a gamer
We started with one question: how do today’s trends shape the gamers of the future? To answer it, we combined interviews with desk research and trend analysis.
Streamer interviews
6 MISFIT Gaming streamers
Stakeholder interviews
ASUS ROG mentors across teams
Desk research
Streaming platforms and categories
Trend analysis
Where gaming culture is heading
Twitch’s top category isn’t a game
On Twitch, the largest streaming platform for gaming, the most-watched category wasn’t Fortnite, League of Legends, or Valorant. It was Just Chatting, where streamers simply talk with their audience.
A streamer revolution
A growing community of gamers, content creators, and entertainers is reinventing how streamers interact with their audiences. That’s where we saw a large untapped market.
What streamers told us
Their audience is the point
“I like being spontaneous when I’m streaming, because it is always so structured and planned-out during the week. Interacting with my viewers often gives me the ability to do that.”
“It’s really important to me and to my stream that I can customize my technology to my personalized taste. The setup has to live in my preferred aesthetics.”
“When I’m in-between major [streams], I like to play tabletop casual mini games to relax and interact with friends, just for a more casual experience.”
“My viewers are the most important thing to me… If there is anything I can do to create a stronger connection to my audience, I will.”
From our interviews with MISFIT Gaming streamers
Key insight
Streamers are redefining what it means to be a gamer, and they’ve created a new space for play and interaction.
Three design criteria
Customization
Viewers follow streamers for their personalities, so the stream itself should express who they are.
Co-creation
Audiences want to make things with the streamer, turning almost anyone into a creator.
Community building
Viewers love feeling part of something bigger. Those communities keep streams alive.
Process
How we got there
We moved from discovery to ideation to design, checking each step against the streamers we interviewed.
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01 · Personas
Two target gamers: the Self-Expressing Gamer (bold, influential, entertaining) and the Health-Conscious Gamer (self-aware, future-focused, informative).
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02 · Sketching
Sketching showed the limits of purely physical products for customization, which pushed us toward digital assets backed by a small set of devices.
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03 · Journey map
A full stream day, mapped with MISFIT Gaming streamers, showed where Spatium could help before, during, and after a stream.
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04 · Storyboard
We planned the scenario shot by shot: what the streamer, her room, and her viewers would each see.
Key design decisions
Three decisions that shaped Spatium
As the team’s UX and system designer, I led these three.
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01 · Experience
A shared room, not another overlay
Viewers could already chat and tip, but streamers told us connection mattered most. So the streamer’s room itself became the place where streamer and audience create together.
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02 · System design
A small kit, mostly digital
Physical products alone couldn’t keep up with how much streamers customize. I designed the system around digital assets, with four devices that each do one job: map the room, track the streamer, tag objects, and show the XR layer.
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03 · Interactions
Gifts viewers can add, and the streamer can touch
Viewers make a gift with an AI asset creator and drop it in with a subscriber access key. The streamer interacts with it live, and some gifts stay and grow until the event ends.
The solution
Meet Spatium
Spatium is a kit of four devices that connect through ASUS’s Armoury Crate app. Together they map a streamer’s room, track people and objects in it, and turn it into an XR space their audience can play in.
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Spatium Lens
AR glasses with an LCoS/DLP lens and bone-conduction audio, so the streamer sees the XR room layered over the real one.
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Spatium Space
Room scanner with LiDAR, depth, HD, and infrared cameras. It maps the room, tracks gestures, and drives environmental lighting.
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Spatium Tracer
Wristband with 8 sensors and an infrared emitter that tells Spatium Space where the streamer is and how they move.
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Spatium Tag
Item tracker that locks onto a reusable sticker, so any object in the room can become part of the XR scene.
User scenario · Part 1 of 2 · Customization
A room that shows who she is
We told the story through a scenario starring Aimsey, a real Twitch streamer. Her favorite holiday is coming, and she wants all of her viewers to celebrate it with her in a winter wonderland.
Streamers customize everything, from digital makeup and lighting to avatars and even their furniture, so Spatium lets the room itself become part of the show.
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Setting up
In Armoury Crate, Aimsey connects every device to build her XR room.
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Tagging the room
She puts an item tracker on her lamp, which she’ll turn into a decoration.
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Turning a lamp into a tree
In Armoury Crate, she turns the tagged lamp into a Christmas tree.
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Before and after
Spatium builds an immersive XR room around her for the stream.
User scenario · Part 2 of 2 · Co-creation and community
Viewers build the stream with her
Audiences don’t just watch anymore. They create, and thousands of communities have formed around streamers. Viewers love feeling part of something bigger, so Spatium lets them add to the room.
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Co-creation
A viewer uses Armoury Crate’s AI asset creator to make a gift for her room.
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Special gifts
With a subscriber-only access key, the viewer drops the gift into her room, and Aimsey can interact with it live.
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Persistent gifts
Another viewer sends a polar bear that stays and grows in her space until the event ends.
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Community building
By the end of the day, her community had helped build her winter wonderland with their own touches, a deeper connection between Aimsey and her viewers.
User testing
Tested with 10+ users
We tested Spatium’s interactions and mechanics with gamers, Twitch viewers, and streamers. People enjoyed the experience, and the studio ended before we could iterate on what we saw.
With more time, I’d test how many viewer gifts a room can hold before it feels cluttered, and how streamers would moderate what lands in their space.
Press
Featured by ROG Global
The team
Built with ASUS ROG
Our team of 4 worked with 22 ROG mentors across 10 functions, from industrial design and software to human factors, and presented to the ROG team at each stage.
Outcome
The animations ASUS bought
ASUS bought the AniMe Matrix lid animations I designed in the studio’s first stage, and Spatium was a finalist for ROG to acquire. It later won a 2023 Core77 Design Award in Gaming.
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Day and night, filmed on the AniMe Matrix lid
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Cursor Pilots, filmed on the AniMe Matrix lid
Reflection
What I learned
- Streams have two audiences. Every interaction had to be fun for Aimsey and for the people watching her, not just one side.
- Sketching changed our minds. We started out drawing a full line of hardware. The sketches showed us that customization worked better as digital assets with a small kit behind them.
If you’d like to learn more, get in touch.
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