Aria
Project Aria: Take Center Stage
Aria is a platform to address real-world needs of people across the world. Aria can work on top of any device (phone, tablet, laptop, kiosk, etc) that runs operating systems (e.g. Android, Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Firefox OS) that support Firefox.
On Aria, solutions delivered can take center stage, yet offer multidimensional experiences. Unlike any other platform available today, these solutions can be shared and spread among people with or without an Internet connection. Aria lowers digital technological barriers to enable access, consumption, personalization and building of interfaces.
Aria leverages as building blocks technologies and capabilities already built at Mozilla for products such as Firefox, Web Runtime, WebMaker/AppMaker, Marketplace, Hello, etc.
Vision: Aria powers success stories on a web of global connected devices that address real-world problems, make people’s lives better, and keep them at the center
Market Problem:
For consumers and for those who serve them, it is often intimidating if not impossible or financially non-viable to address real-world use-cases using digital tools and technologies.
Examples of Use-cases -
Consumers:
• Personal: Customize your own device
• For Others: Set up a device (e.g. the one you gift your mom/dad)
• Consumer interactions: Share interfaces you like with others
• Community: Build and share interface for projects (e.g. cleanup drive on a lake shore)
Providers Serving Consumer Needs:
Use-cases Examples:
• Education: Custom tablet interface for students, teachers actively edit assignments or notes for students with no printout, website management, apps, etc
• Healthcare: Custom interfaces for healthcare workers to gather data or serve clients, while actively distributing digital appointment cards, info booklets, etc
• Retail: Custom interfaces for stores that sell handsets to up-sell with brochures, coupons, accept orders, etc
• Banks: Embedding financial services into handsets for purchases, payments, remittances, money transfers, etc
Numerous similar use-cases exist across sectors such as Agriculture, Media, Governance, among others including Corporate BYOD situations.
No platform permits consumer-level simplicity of customizable interfaces. Apps & Mobile Websites both require technical knowledge, marketing, maintenance, etc. In the process, operational & business objectives along with consumer needs take back seat.
Budgets spent by nations, NGOs and businesses on apps and mobile websites for education, healthcare, etc have been limited in their successes in fulfilling use-cases. Aria attempts to fill these gaps that both apps and websites currently leave behind.
Solution Offered:
For Consumers For Entities Serving Consumers -
Experience - Intuitively fulfill your needs
Share - To nurture communities
Personalize - Around your life
Build - With simple drag-and-drop
Update - Without the hassles
Extend - To your multidimensional life
Collaborate - For Our Better Tomorrow
Product:
The Aria platform consists of
Canvas - The interface which delivers content within Cards, bringing Simplicity
Studio - With visual methods to develop & manipulate, with Low Technology Barriers
Payload - For ownership, sharing, management & interop, providing User Agency
Services - For services to deliver holistic experiences, offering Extensibility
Benefits:
With Aria, customize the interface and experience of your own device. Or the one you gift your mom or dad. Or implement the community project’s interface. Or tailor the experience of tablets your school district distributes. Or enable a lecturer to create and distribute class notes. Or customize the devices used by healthcare workers in the field. Or incorporate financial services into devices a bank distributes. Or have kiosks distribute coupons or boarding passes. Or geofenced coupons that you receive within an area. Or accessing IOT (Internet of Things) services. Possibilities with Aria are endless.
FAQ
Q. What is Project Aria?
At its core, Project Aria is a platform for human development. It empowers consumers and those who serve them with low-barrier digital technologies to address real-world needs in sectors such as education, healthcare, agriculture, media, retail, banking, etc across advanced and emerging markets, while still addressing consumers' multidimensional lives beyond one vertical.
Q. What does Aria's platform do?
The Aria platform offers a visual and community experience unlike apps or websites can. With Aria's platform, anyone can quickly put together a content interface that can take center stage on a screen of a phone, tablet, kiosk, TV, or PC. Any consumer using these screens can also share this interface and thereby the content in it with others nearby or connected.
Q. Does Aria look like an app?
The Aria experience is deeply embedded on Firefox OS. On devices with the open source Android OS, Aria may be equivalent to a launcher. On Google Android, it can function as a widget, unless Google Now becomes more flexible. On other platforms supporting Firefox, Aria may function as an app.
Q. What is the Aria experience?
Aria offers a visually rich experience of Cards on a Canvas, both of which users can share with family, friends, communities, clients, colleagues, etc. Cards display snippets of relevant information pulled from files, databases, servers, etc on the local device or the Internet. Cards can update live in real time, with or without an Internet connection, depending on the source and additional processing needed. Users can personalize their Canvas by moving around, adding or removing Cards. They can also add other Canvases, build their own, or disable Canvases entirely.
Q. Why not use an app or website?
Aria lives alongside apps and websites and fills critical gaps in consumer needs that apps and websites do not. For example, a core job function of a healthcare worker is to educate and inform clients. Her organization aims to reach a wide audience and help her focus on her tasks. While speech is unrecorded and forgotten, flyers waste paper and resources. SMS is limited in information and notifications are lost in the clutter. Sharing an app or website requires building, updating, discovering, training, engaging, etc via technology that is often intimidating to both the worker and the client. Aria's Cards can easily be shared over ad hoc networks as well as over the Internet with prospective moms or with communities to avoid disease, get vaccines, schedule checkups, or even connect with others nearby but quarantined. Aria lowers barriers so the common person can get involved. Retail stores selling phones can up-sell other goods, schools distributing tablets can customize interfaces for students, banks can embed financial services, media firms can virally distribute rich content, communities can organize around it. Aria's sharing capability allows distribution beyond existing channels along with consumer choice and freedom with the interfaces on their devices.
Q. How does one build Canvases and Cards?
Aria offers a toolset called the Studio. The Studio comes with a default Canvas. This default Canvas contains multidimensional content within existing Cards ranging from weather to maps to music. The toolset enables anyone to add or remove existing Cards and to build their own using simple drag and drop. New cards can be easily linked to content in a file on the device, a URL for a Youtube video, link to an image on the Internet, a Web Service, a database query, etc. No programming skills are needed for these, although programmers are welcome to build more complex features. Once the custom Canvas is ready, Studio enables its publication to Mozilla's cloud service. Thereafter, use your custom Canvas on your device, set it up for your mom on the device you gift to her, share it with your community, or set it up for your workplace. It's yours.
Q. Where does one get the Studio?
The Studio will be made available on a Mozilla website.
Q. What else does a user need to run Aria?
Aria's key requirement is an operating system that supports Firefox. Currently, these are Windows, Android, Linux, Mac OS, and Firefox OS.
Q. How does one obtain Aria?
For those selling or distributing devices, the Studio can be used to build a custom Canvas. Depending on the organization, they can customize the Canvas to upsell goods, build custom interfaces for their employees or students, etc. Then either use the Studio to publish the custom Canvas to all devices, or publish to one device and then use the sharing feature to publish to more devices. Consumers interested in Aria can follow the same steps for the device they own or intend to gift or share with their communities. Consumers can also receive Aria from others when a someone shares a Card or Canvas they have found useful, and the consumer follows that link to install Aria from Mozilla's website or from the app store related to their device.
Q. When will Aria be available?
Aria's first phase was to confirm Problem-Solution fit. After this phase, Aria will go through a 1st round of Pilots to ascertain Product-Market fit and note operational details while working with one partner organization (NGO or a firm with a socially responsible project). This phase will be followed up with a 2nd round of Pilots for commercial valuation and to highlight success stories. Thereafter, a Beta program is meant to support additional providers of services along with their customers. If we cross metrics that point to success this far, Aria can move into generating scale and getting to a public launch. Meanwhile, if Aria is successful in delivering to consumers value worthy of engagement, given the sharing capability Aria might already spread around creating a market of its own.
Q. What can Aria not do?
Aria is not meant to solve all problems and cannot be applied to all use-cases. A primary limitation of Aria is that it requires the architecture of your solution to have a modular design. If your software solution performs all operations within the user interface, it will need to be split to work with Aria. Typical MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture common to the World Wide Web is best if you are bringing existing software solutions Aria. Behind the scenes, you can use any programming language as long as the content Aria requires is available to the Cards in HTML5. In addition, the Studio is not meant to address 100% of use-cases with mere drag-and-drop, although over time the templates in Studio can be tailored to enable roughly 80% of consumer use-cases. For advanced programming, Studio allows you to view the source code and tailor it to your requirements.
Q. What is Aria changing in the digital economy?
Aria brings a unique interface and a new form of content ownership. Outside the digital economy, if you purchase a product, you own the product and can do with it what you want. In the last decade, if you purchased a digital product, your rights to that product and its complementary goods (e.g. apps, music, etc) have been limited to a license the manufacturer leased to you. This digital model creates pockets of strong control and app stores are merely one manifestation of this phenomenon. Aria enables the common person a lower barrier to entry into the world of tailoring and personalizing their own interfaces. Because most of us are both consumers and providers of services to other consumers via our occupation, Aria as a platform enables the common consumer to unlock economic and social value using benefits of digital technology, without having to abide by the prevailing model of the digital economy.
Q. How did Project Aria begin?
The project began from first principles starting at the study of market dynamics, consumer needs, competitive forces, technological trends, economic analyses, etc. The study was meant to answer questions about another product. Among recommendations for that product was one to spin off a platform that addressed real-world needs of people across the world. Further synthesis of this option, study of consumer behaviors and jobs-to-be-done, along with inputs from 50+ external firms and 50+ Mozillians led to Project Aria.
Q. Why is it called Aria?
The solution came before the name. The solution designed lets anyone's content take center stage on the screen with a visually-rich though simple interface, without much technical complexity. Their content taking center stage may be self-contained, but it's still part of a larger multidimensional experience which fulfills the consumers' needs. What's something that's self-contained, not complex, yet beautiful, and still part of a larger multidimensional experience? An Aria. This name is subject to change at launch.
Q. What's next for Aria?
Aria's focus for now will be to help the people of the world get involved in technology and direct its utility towards addressing real-world needs. That said, the Aria platform is an interface for services, both real-world services and software services such as collaboration, messaging, mapping, etc. Within Internet of Things, the value consumers derive is gradually shifting towards IoT services that are expected to dominate IoT value after 2018. Aria is an interface for consumers to visualize, be informed about, and participate in the explosion of data about and around them.
