Presentation Feedback II

Alright stop.!

Feedback.

Time to listen!

Guess who's back with brand new insights.

For Feedback round two we saw some of the concerns from the first proposal raised again and some really good insights into how we can evolve the project. People were again quick to question how users would know that they were supposed to join hands. Feedback suggested that we should have the scene change the closer users hands got together could help encourage interaction between users. Additionally if we increased the number of participants it might make the experience less awkward though potentially less personal. Personally I think we should focus more on encouraging the interaction between two users and help them create a story 'just for them' to deliver a more immersive experience.

Again people were questioning whether the Kinect will be able to handle our proposed system. It guess we wont really know until we develop the system further. That said we will hopefully have a completed projector stand by the end of this week that we can use to test starting next week.

Additionally there was a lot of positive feedback regarding our idea of implementing sound within the project. People felt that ambient sounds would be effective in not only bringing people into the exhibit but would be essential in making the story feel real. Hopefully with added audio elements we will be able to create a space that invite and also makes people feel comfortable and willing to interact.

Other good feedback was related to the actual interactive space and the scenes that would be displayed on them. How many scenes for example? At this point I will be happy if we can implement one but ideally I would like at least three for the end product. Feedback also suggested that we have objects in the center of the board that invite users to reach out together and cause them to create a straight line. This interplay between users is really what will be deciding factor between a successful project or not.

Finally we need to have a better way of informing people on how they should interact with the system rather than instructions placed on the table. I think this was more of a panic answer to our audience questions as during the break all team members expressed a desire to not have instructions and make the interaction intuitive. The idea of having a hand cut out in the scene or an object in the scene that was hand shaped coming forward.

Hopefully we will be able to dig into this feedback further next week after we have completed our other deliverables for this week.

Presentation Part II: A week in review.

Last week everyone presented their current progress on their projects. Some teams had super impressive prototypes (looking at you Team Not-a-Robot) which made me feel that our team was super behind where we needed to be. On the flip side though some other teams seemed to be struggling a lot more than ours, so I guess that means we are right about where we need to be. Ken has been carrying the team so far with his work in unity getting the prototype up to a point where we could show both the functionality we want to implement and our progress with the Kinect system.

With Ken coding madly Shilpi, Aster and I worked on getting the actual presentation content and interaction plan nailed down. We were in a pretty good position having physically storyboarded our concept in for the first presentation and not changing our method. This left us more time to talk about how we had incorporated feedback from our initial prototyping into our design moving forward which I think was beneficial. Still determining exactly how to scope our success criteria was difficult. It was hard to know how optimistic to be given our current progress on the prototype and inexperience using unity. Being realistic yet challenging enough is always a struggle when working with group expectations.

Overall I think our presentation went well, despite some Kinect and PowerPoint hiccups. We were one of the few teams that actually touched on their background sources and really recapped our project. Also we used the full 10 minutes which has to be a good thing.

Our focus for this week is to continue progressing on our prototype and hopefully have it functioning to the point where we can start implementing the projector and seeing some meaningful interactions. Ken and I will be looking at the materials we need to get things up to scratch and make a fun trip to Bunnings. Additionally we will need to decide as a group how best we can communicate our concept in the explainer video.

Story Boarding Ahoy!

User Testing Recap

[b]My first Day at University[/b]
[i]A short story by an overhead projector.[/i]

It has been a long time since I had been turned on, I was starting to think that nobody loved me anymore :(

But then I got a ride into UQ with this cool guy.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/6ziNTyu.jpg[/img]

Then I got carried around all over the place, talked to some grumpy engineering guys who poked and prodded me. They told me I was not going to explode and put a cool sticker on me so I guess it was ok.

Then I got taken to this cool looking room and thrown on my side. I mean I did not even know I could project onto the floor. MIND BLOWN, and there were cool pictures of bunnies and butterflies.

Today was a good day.

[b]User Testing Feedback Summary.[/b]

Feedback on our first prototyping session was largely mixed, and it is difficult to narrow down how much that feedback was due to the nature of the prototype using an old OHP or the experience itself. While some users enjoyed the scenario we created an the experience, most remarked that it was not very interactive. Having images track users arms (planned) and potentially allowing them to touch the images projected onto them (not planned but interesting) were ideas that came up.

That said everyone who participated in the test stated that they would be interested in experiencing it again, albeit with a different scenario. The theme which came up again was having the ability for users to record their experience so they could share it with others. This is something that we are planning to implement should we get the technology working.

Overall we were interested in testing what kind of emotions or emotive response we could get from users even in a low fidelity test. The overwhelming response was that the image of a bunny hopping along users arms from one participant to another made the biggest connection with people. The scenario was also described as happy and relaxing which is a point in the right direction for our project.

Testers suggested that cute images like the bunny in combination with motion would be a good way to have people interact with each other. Additionally adding in controls for gestures could make the experience feel more interactive and social.

While other suggested scenarios included sci-fi and fantasy themed stories the majority of testers felt that the nature / rainforest theme we had chosen was working well. One suggestion was that we could have the users interacting on different levels of the rainforest dependant on how high or low their arm was. To have for example a sky layer when users hands were higher off the interactive table on the rainforest floor lower down and underground if they were flat on the table.

Overall people liked most the feeling that they were part of the story and the surprise of what was going to happen.

Report BACK!

Fridays report back session was interesting with all the groups giving a quick heads up on where they were in their projects. It was a good chance to get more feedback from the tutors on our project and get an idea of how far ahead / behind we are compared with everyone else. Something that Peter said was super useful in that we should not get lost in the technical implementation and instead go for a simple option which we could build and start testing.

Team Wearables were tossing up between Arduino or RasperryPI to power their wearable device. GoodVibes (CHANGED THEIR NAME, treble makers was an excellent pun so now I am sad) they were also diving into the tech and had a semi-functional prototype. This seemed to be the theme for a lot of teams working their way into the technology and building their prototypes. It makes me feel like we are a little bit behind the eight-ball as we have yet to really start making any meaningful progress towards our digital prototype yet.

The tangible data team has split their group into three with everyone working on something different. Someone was working on gathering data for them and putting in a usable form for unity, someone on building the beast AI and other working on the glove wearable. This really hit home that we need to start allocating some heavy tasks to each team member so that we can get into the meat of this project.  We quickly talked about allocating our work out like such: Unity depth work, Unity animation work, Scenario design work.

Team Zhu are also going to be using the Kinect with depth sensor for their project using unity so we need to make sure we keep in touch with them. Our teams can hopefully work together on coding problems and help with technical issues.

For the presentation next week  we have a lot of work to do in terms of the actual build of the prototype  so thankfully it is an informal presentation. However we need to think about what we want to communicate to the class and the experience we want to deliver at the end.

Tech Time

On Tuesdays session we had demonstrations from both Peter and Jason on technologies we could use in our projects that might be relevant. Peter talked through Arduino's which I had heard about last semester in Digitial Prototyping when we used a Makey Makey. The Arduino is a micro-controller which basically means its a tiny computer that you can fit onto a whole bunch of other attachments to support WiFi and Bluetooth. While they look interesting they are probably not super applicable for our project unless we get around to implementing additional functionality like vibrations and temperature controls.

Jason talked through fiducial marker and how you could use images as markers to create a connection between them using the Kinect. He talked through Reactivision and some of the functionality that the Kinect has out of the box, being able to detect hands open or closed. While this could be interesting to use for our project, because we are planning to have the Kinect mounted from above it will be unable to detect bodies in the normal way. So we will have to use the depth sensor and take the difference of a stock frame with no users in the interaction space and one with the user in the space. Alternatively we could use the infrared camera and put some sort of reflective spots or wearable onto our user. However our team decided that it would be better to avoid putting things on people if possible to keep the interaction simple and barrier free.

Additionally the kinect has a full HD camera which we could use to provide a live stream of what was happening in the installation or record previous interactions and play them back to attract users to the exhibit. Finally the team discussed implementing gestures using the infrared cam having dots on a users hand. Hand open would show the dot and hand closed would hide it so we could have these two states affect the story telling process.

Proposal Feedback

Last week all the groups presented their ideas to the rest of the class for feedback. It was really good to get a better idea on what everyone else will be doing for the exhibition and there were a lot of fun ideas. It was also really good to see some projects evolving already with initial ideas thrown out and refinements made. That was the major feedback our team received on our written proposal and I feel like we did a much better job of explaining our concept and talking through the interaction in the presentation. We gave a concrete scenario which may or may not end up being one of the scenarios we use when we exhibit the project, but regardless it was a really good way to communicate our idea. I also think we did a good job of showing where our inspirations had come from and showing what parts we took from each background project we presented.

Our presentation aside it was good to be able to think critically about other people's projects and help contribute something to their project with the feedback sheets. While at times I got lost in a presentation rather than jotting down notes it was a good exercise. With all the feedback now scanned in I thought I would explore the themes and recurring feedback that our presentation got.
Feedback:

• Touching aspect might be an issue for some users
• Keeping users in the experience and attracting them.
• Adding extra feedback (vibration)
• Story duration (Projection on the table also)
• Emotions and their relation to gestures (Gestures to create visualizations)
• Theme Opposites attract.
• Handling cancelling of interaction early
• Need Theme and message
• Taking the story with them after (tiny gif)
• User boredom
• More people more fun
• How will you make the interactions intuitive?
• Who controls the content? (User vs PreGenerated)

The issue of users personal space causing problems is something that we will have to explore further during our user testing, as we do not want to exclude people from our exhibition. Though we will also be providing a way for people not directly in the interactive zone to view the story. Providing a video showing a live feed like this could also be a good way to attract people to the exhibit. Again we will need to conduct tests to see how long we can maintain users attention to ensure the stories progress quickly enough to avoid boredom.
Exploring the implied meaning of hand gestures and motions is something that we will need to look at as this could definitely help us to nail down a theme for our stories. Coming up with a consistent theme and message to tell through the animations would really help keep users engaged with the installation. Additionally involving users in the content by having them take it away with them or generate some or it, could be an interesting avenue.

Lots to think about and a big week ahead, should be fun ^.^

Feedback Fun

After today's proposal feedback session I am feeling a lot better about the state of our project. Getting the feedback late last night was a little disheartening  and left me feeling like our concept and idea was not good enough. Though after discussing with all of the tutors it seems that our major issue was just the way that we communicated our concept and our interaction method, so hopefully we can do a much better job of explaining during the presentation on Friday.

Based on the feedback we thought a lot more about how the application would actually work and what we would project. We have settled on an installation table where users could sit and place their arms into the view of a projector and kinect. Both the projector and kinect would be mounted above the user and displaying images down onto the users.

Maree helped us define a scenario in which it would be used and how it would work which gave us a much better idea of how to communicate it. In the scenario two users would sit on opposite sides of the installation. One user would have a small seed projected onto their arm when it entered the projected space, while another user would have a rain cloud projected onto them. When the two users extend their arms and touch each other the cloud would rain droplets 'down' onto the seed. So particles would be animated across the two arms and allow the users to share the story.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/qcAmlo3.jpg[/img]

We briefly (and very badly) storyboarded the idea out within the group to make sure everyone was on the same page. And run through how we could physically act out the scenario during Fridays presentation to make it clear to the audience. Having the seed grow from the rain into a sapling and then into a full grown tree with the trunk crossing both users arms.

Now its time to think more about the human values and the emotions we are intending to evoke in people interacting with our project and the type of experience we want to delivery. Our initial ideas and themes all center around nature and growth. So I think we want to give people a sense of stillness and calm and a feeling of building something. Then adding in some playful and more surprising interactions to take advantage of the physical nature of the story telling. For example we discussed what kind of reactions we might get if the tree from the scenario was cut down. Wood chips flying everywhere and then disappearing from the users arms.