Sebastian Holmqvist

SAS HAX Hackathon

1st Prize - Connecting Travelers

SAS is Scandinavia's biggest airline and has been around since 1946.
They were the first airline to fly over the north pole, first to hire a female pilot and they're on the forefront in the pursuit for environmental friendly fuel. Through the jetset age and the gold years of airlines, through thick and thin they've remained one of Europe's foremost and most appreciated airlines.

From 70+ teams of engineering and design teams from around the world, me and my teammate were crowned winners by a jury of CIO's and CTO's from SAS and Volvo among others.

The event at SAS HQ in Stockholm was designed to help SAS reach new heights in user experience and digital innovation in their first ever 24h Hackathon.

Team: Sebastian Holmqvist & Laura Becedas Segerström

Big Dreams, Big Travel

Interactive prototype

This project for travel agency Big Travel was separated into two parts: a UX strategy and an interactive prototype.

The UX strategy was an extensive report/style guide that was used to both capture and convey the overall user experience that Big Travel should use across their digital platforms.
The prototype was a fully functional app to showcase our ideas and it demonstrated a potential tool for online booking of flights, hotels and car rentals.
We also suggested and featured a personal savings account "Big Dreams" where users could easily save money for upcoming trips etc.

Interactive VR Clothing Store

Master Thesis Project

For my Master thesis I built an interactive virtual clothing store in which I conducted tests. The project is part of a larger research project at KTH Stockholm with the aim to investigate how to decrease theft in stores using sonification.

The VR environment was installed on an Oculus Quest and after a brief test simulation, the subjects would enter the store and given directions to buy certain objects listed on a "shopping list". By tracking their position and head movement I could evaluate their behaviour and their awareness of sound triggers and various audio events. Qualitative results were also gathered in interviews after the undergone simulation.

Developed with Unity.

Whirling Willow

Physical Interaction Design

An interactive flower on the theme "Shape Shifting". The aim was for the design to convey a kind of personality and for it to be exciting and pleasing to interact with. It ended up cheering people up in the KTH library for a couple of weeks.

Built with all kinds of carefully selected materials but mostly laser cut wood and different 3D-printed components. Mechatronics and programming of different sensors and motors. Developed with Arduino.

Air Drums

Multi-Modal Interaction

A fully functioning air drum set built using Unity and an old Xbox Kinect. Please pay no mind to the awesome graphics, they will likely hurt your eyes.

The various drums were scripted using Unity’s collision boxes and its physics engine using its support library in C#. Incorporating the Kinect movement scripts with these collision boxes was a fairly simple and intuitive process thanks to Unitys scripting documentation of collision events. When a collision was detected between the sphere and a drum, the corresponding sound of the drum was played. Pretty straightforward but a lot of tweaking.

A playable demo was ready quite early on for extensive testing, and iterations were carried out throughout the project.

Orienteering Gone Digital

Mobile Development with Web Technologies

Hockey, go home.
No sport is more Swedish nor weird than Orienteering.

This project produced an Orienteering app with working NFC tags as control stations instead of analog stamp thingies.
It featured a stripped map (can't make it too easy right?), built-in NFC-sensitive control cards instead of stamps, different courses and user activity logging.

Built by using Google Maps API, Onsen UI, NFC-tags, CSS, HTML, Java. Persistence through localStorage.

Wtf is Orienteering? Here you go.

Near Field Orienteering

Going Blind - A Haptic Video Game

Haptics & Tangible Interaction

Experimental haptic experience. We wanted to find out how well 3D-haptics work as a navigational tool by creating and testing a simple video game.

Developed in Unity with Novint Falcon. We went through pilot studies before moving on to usability and user tests in an iterative process. Very well received with exciting results.

Oh, music

Notice to Airmen

Since 2012 upon until recently me and a couple of friends played some music together and, arguably, we did pretty good. Without any promotion we've managed to amass over half a million plays on Spotify (alone) and my guess is we're prevalent on other platforms as well.
‍
In our super awesome band Notice to Airmen, I sat by the piano, in front of the microphone and behind different guitars and mixers doing this and that. We produced everything ourselves and I took care of the editing and mixing.
‍
Our EP 'It Does Matter' was recorded in Stockholm and mastered at Abbey Road Studios, London. Released in 2017.

The EP and other tracks are still available here and there.

Notice to Airmen on Spotify:

We Will Part

Original motion picture soundtrack

During 2015/2016 Notice to Airmen composed, produced and mixed the soundtrack for the feature film "We Will Part" by director Pablo Fernandez.

We tried to match the film's melancholic style and since the script was pretty sparse with lines, a lot of music were written and it is a dominant element in the film. Available on Amazon Prime.
‍
Watch the trailer
‍
Listen to the soundtrack
‍

Additionally, I've worked with foley on the movie "Beyond The Border" from 2011, and composer and producer for bits of music for different TV-shows on Swedish Television, SVT.

Internship at renowned Dreamhill Studios in Stockholm 2010-2011
‍

Interactive Media Engineer - Stockholm