08 / trainAR · Masters capstone · 2021
A pocket gym, powered by AR
Six-month capstone at UNT: an AR fitness app that puts a life-sized virtual trainer in your living room, so form, schedule, and progression all live in one place.
Role
Sole designer · researcher · prototyper
Team
Solo capstone project, advised by UNT faculty; partnered with a healthcare company for domain input
Duration
6 months
Platforms
iOS (AR) · Concept prototype
Problem
Home workouts left people guessing about form.
Between the pandemic and rising gym costs, more people were training at home from YouTube videos. Everyone I interviewed said the same two things: they weren't sure their form was right, and they had no personal trainer to correct it. Existing apps showed the exercise on a phone screen; none put it in the room with you.
trainAR started from a simple bet: if a life-sized virtual trainer could stand in your living room, matched to your height and equipment, home workouts could stop being a guess and start feeling like a session.
Process
Interviews first, AR second.
01 · Comparative audit
Audited the fitness apps I already used, then widened the set. Picked one as the baseline to interrogate and improve, so interview questions had a concrete artifact to anchor on instead of abstract 'what do you want' prompts.
02 · 15+ interviews and surveys
Google Forms and Instagram polls for breadth, one-on-one conversations with 15+ people for depth. Recurring signal: 100% weren't confident in their workout posture, 75% cross-checked knowledge with a trainer friend, and 50% had stopped exercising at some point for lack of structure.
03 · Key functionalities
Curated exercises based on goals, equipment, and available days. A life-sized AR trainer that shows the movement in your space. Body-map pain points so you know where the exercise should be felt. Recovery and injury flows. Gamification and a social layer for friends and family.
04 · Sketch to hi-fi
Paper sketches for the product journey, low-fi wireframes in Sketch, then a high-fi pass after critique: unify the onboarding treatment across the app, add interaction to the assessment screens, and let the linework from onboarding become a recurring visual motif.
Use cases
Selected artifacts from the six-month build.
Home · schedule + today's session
The Home screen frames the training week as a single object — today's session first, the rest of the week as context. The linework motif carried through from onboarding gives the app a consistent visual signature across screens.
AR session · life-sized trainer in your space
The core interaction: point the camera at your floor, and a life-sized virtual trainer appears in the room, scaled to match your height. The session runs alongside the trainer, so you're mirroring a person in your space, not watching a video on a screen.
Product journey map
The end-to-end journey from first launch through onboarding, goal-setting, session, and recovery. Built early so every screen we designed after it had to earn its place on the map, not the other way around.
Results
A defensible capstone, and a working thesis about AR fitness.
15+
user interviews
1:1
life-sized AR trainer
6
core functionalities scoped
trainAR shipped as a capstone: a full research trail, a product journey map, low-fi and hi-fi flows, and a defensible thesis about where AR belongs in fitness. Not a launched app — a rigorously scoped concept with real user data behind every decision.
The honest limitation is that the AR trainer depends on hardware and ML that weren't shippable in 2021. The plan named that head-on: object recognition, body-motion detection, lighting constraints, and full-body tracking as the next frontier. The design bet was that when that stack matured, the interaction model — trainer in your space, guidance in the moment, program around the session — would still be right.
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