Summary of the week: This week was halves! We presented first on Monday! We also created a full experience playtest and visited the first CMU Drama production of the semester, A Doll’s House!
Halves Presentation
We presented first on Monday!
Overall, our presentation went very well and we are very proud of our performance at halves! In our faculty feedback report, we met or exceeded expectations in most categories. We got a lot of positive feedback regarding our energy and preparedness for the presentation! We were happy to hear this as we spent a lot of time rehearsing as a team over the past week/weekend. We also got a lot of comments that our presentation was very clear! This was great to hear as well because this was a concept that we did not present at quarters so it was totally new to most of the faculty and we really wanted to make sure it was easily understood what we were doing. We were happy to hear that all of the information came across well. Most of the concerns that we got were with the challenges of a tight deadline and install, which are concerns that we understand as a team and expected the faculty to bring up.
Meeting with Eliot
In our meeting, Eliot told us that we may need to get approval from liaisons to work with actors for recording audio for our project. She told us that she will work on this as well as getting us a list of objects that could be used for the pedestals.
Electrosonic Visit
Location-Based Entertainment company Electrosonic was visiting the ETC this week! They watched our Halves Presentation live and told us that they loved it! They also paid a visit to our project room to discuss our project and similar work done by companies like Holoplot. They told us that they thought we had a great scope for the time we have and purposes of the project and that they would go about the project in a very similar way if it were them! It was great to get their support and advice!
Full Experience Playtest
We worked as a team to develop a prototype “vertical slice” of our experience with a cloud, umbrella, pedestal, object, and directional speaker with an example audio track.
Aldora created a pedestal in the same size and shape that we wanted.
Lauren tested rigging fishing line across the second floor balcony at the ETC, different types of knots for hanging the show set pieces, hanging an umbrella from the fishing line, which height was best for hanging the umbrella, installing a speaker in the umbrella, and counterbalancing the umbrella with the off-center weight of the speaker inside.
Jiaxin tested creating a larger cloud using additional fluff and hanging the cloud from the balcony.
Angie bought an umbrella and fishing line to test with and recorded a sample dialogue track for the speaker.
Charlie set up the directional speakers.
We presented our prototype experience to our faculty advisors. It also attracted the attention of a large group of first years who were passing by! Everyone was very excited about the installation and was really amazed by the directional speaker technology! We learned a lot of little details and lessons through this test that we will take with us to our final install. Overall, we are very proud of how this test went! We will leave the installation hanging above the second floor balcony at the ETC over the break to see if any issues arise over time like sagging in the fishing line.
We also did some testing of the UV lights and invisible ink pens.
We tested the UV lights on different materials including cloth and acrylic. Acrylic performed the best!
According to Fire Safety Manager Tim Flaherty, the legal limit for dimming the lobby lighting is 1 foot candle/11 lux which is perfect for our experience! It will allow us to dim the lobby to immerse guests more into the storm and to enhance the UV light effect.
A Doll’s House Production
As a team, we went to see CMU Drama’s first production of the season, A Doll’s House. We also went before the show and stayed after to observe audience behaviors and do some tests.
There were installations in the lobby including projects from several CMU Drama classes, cardboard toy blocks, and a cardboard doll house that asked people to write on paper and submit answers to deep and emotional questions.
We found that most people did not interact with the installations. We believed this to be due to the layout of the installation. For example, the doll house was in the corner of the lobby in the back so we think that most people did not even notice it. Those that did often still did not participate, though, possibly due to the very deep and emotional nature of the questions. We hope that since our installation is spread throughout the lobby, it will be more easily visible than this installation and engage more people. Additionally, our experience requires much less activation energy and outward emotional vulnerability, so we hope that it will be more accessible to guests.
We took note of how large the crowds got in the lobby and at what times. Lauren did several counts around the lobby and found that the largest crowds were at 20 min before showtime and 5 min before showtime, both with crowds of around 50 people. After the show, people congregated near the box office/exit of the theater or at the tables/columns, though it was mostly cast and crew that stayed around for the first show celebration.
We also did some audio tests in the lobby and we found that dB measurements in the lobby ranged around 70-80 dB which was what we expected. This should work well for our experience!