Post Mortem
As a team we created a list of things that we thought we did well this semester and a list of things we wish we had done. Additionally, we all individually wrote a brief reflection on the challenges and successes we faced as individuals. Team Did Well: Prototyped and tested environment and iteration concepts Especially relevant for the first two weeks and last half of the semester Had ability to get a vast amount of quantitative and qualitative data Explored several representations of biofeedback Adapted to changing sensors well/staying on track despite a major change in the product Connected and communicated with Equa Listened to and acting on feedback Wish We Had Done: Research sensors more deeply in the beginning Split our efforts during our sensor crisis so that we could make design progress and research progress instead of swarming to solve the sensor crisis Built a more systematic &…
Week 14 – April 25, 2022
Final Presentation Preparation The majority of this week’s time was focused on preparing for our final presentation on Thursday. On Wednesday we had a presentation content review of our second deck iteration with Heather and Dave. Essentially all of Friday was devoted to updating the slide deck to be focused around the insights we have gained from building the experience. We have several practices planned for the rest of next week, both in the RPIS and in our project room. We’ve also invited Dr. Creswell, Mathew, Ian, and Patrick from Equa Health to our final presentation and organized a final play session for all of them afterwards. Final Playtesting We had a final round of playtesting with Shirley and Patrick at the beginning of this week to help guide some of the polishing of our experience. Shirley’s main feedback was regarding buffing up the soundscape and Patrick was wholly satisfied…
Week 13 – April 18, 2022
Soft Opening This week was the Soft Opening at the ETC. We had most of our testing on Monday. We kicked off the day with Shirley, our faculty consultant, followed by Brenda, John, Dave, Heather, and Mike. On Wednesday, Ricardo also came by to give feedback. Faculty feedback slots were generally an hour long with a couple of half hour spots. We had a wide variety of affinity in our feedback, with Brenda being very critical of our experience and Mike really enjoying it. Everybody’s responses were roughly what we were expecting and we got a lot of feedback that has helped us prioritize changes. Most of the overlapping feedback between faculty members led us to making changes in the UI so that meditators could more easily select options and read the final graph. Heather and Mike had the most improvement in respiration rate, which felt affirming for the team.…
Week 12 – April 11, 2022
Meeting with Equa We kicked this week off with a playtest with Equa’s COO Mathew Polowitz and Equa’s Lead Engineer, Ian McCullough. The playtest with the general feedback being that the biofeedback should be more noticeable. We also found a few bugs involving orbs/boxes spawning into the meditator’s hands causing some parts of the experience to auto-select. After we get some other fixes in from Playtest Day this week and merge changes, we will spend the rest of the semester iterating on the strength and noticeability of our biofeedback indicators. User Experience and Playtest Inspired Changes This week was focused on making tweaks from the feedback received during playtesting. While we continue to optimize assets and play around with the intensity of the environmental biofeedback, we have made three major changes to benefit user experience. Firstly, as mentioned as a to-do from last week’s blog post, we swapped hand gesture…
Week 11 – April 4, 2022
Playtest Day Playtest Day was on Saturday and went well. We got 9 total testers, 5 of which used the Hexoskin with live respiration data. The other 4 used either pre-recorded data and an Apple Watch or the Equa mobile app. All users reported more positive feeling changes after the meditation with all using VR being satisfied or very satisfied with the layout, location, and color palette of the virtual environment. A lot of the feedback we received confirmed our own criticisms of our experience. In general, most people missed the environmental biofeedback and really enjoyed following the dragonflies around the environment. Additionally, we noticed that some playtesters were getting the “pause” and “play” hand gestures backwards. We were also told about some graphics and optimization bugs by a particularly astute playtester. There were also a few issues involving the user positioning relative to the environment. Playtesters found it particularly…
Week 10 – March 28, 2022
Playtest Day Preparation This week was all about playtesting. We kicked off the week with a playtesting workshop to get the team focused on what central question we want our playtests to answer. Faris and Zibo spent a majority of their time creating separate builds so we could perform A/B tests using real biofeedback from the Hexoskin and prerecorded biofeedback with an Apple Watch. Lauren worked on optimizing some of the art for our Quest build to keep the frames per second at a good rate. Constanza and Gillian worked on ironing out the logistics of Playtest Day by creating: a pre-survey, a post-survey, and interview questions a room flow plan a time usage plan a shift schedule Testing with Peers, Faculty Consultants, and Simcoach Guests To test out our Playtest Day plan and gather more data, we tested on two of our peers at the ETC and with our…
Week 9 – March 21, 2022
Production and Playtesting This week marked the end of our final major asset sprint. We’ve also been collecting feedback from our instructors and faculty consultants to help us iterate on our existing environment. As we move forward into the next few weeks, we’ll be focusing a lot on playtesting. We have a few opportunities lined up to get feedback from people outside of the ETC, but we’ll also start doing more testing within the team as we rapidly iterate our assets. UI/UX This week Constanza spent a lot of time focusing on UI changes. This includes both how the meditator interacts in the environment as well as how they receive instructions. While going through the script, Constanza and Gillian picked out spots in the first 2 sections of the meditation that would benefit from pictorial instructions in addition to the audio instructions. Constanza then created several 2D assets to be…
Week 8 – March 14, 2022
User Experience Gillian and Constanza spent this week editing and iterating the script for our meditation. As a team, and with Equa’s consent, we decided to cut the script down to focus on Seeing and Hearing Out (that is, seeing and hearing what is around you) since those are the senses best manipulated by VR. Using this shift in focus to solely “outward” senses, we mapped out a visual scene to take place involving a dragonfly as a dynamic focal point and created a list of sounds the meditator should hear in the environment. We also spent time discussing the sense of “Feel,” which is the third sense addressed by Equa in their meditations. We discussed what it means for the meditator to feel something in VR, and decided that one thing we could do was draw attention to the headset the user is wearing. We’re currently planning on moving…
Week 7 – February 28, 2022
Halves Presentation and Reflection Our halves presentation was on Monday morning and, as a team, we think it went over acceptably. We spent a lot of time over the weekend practicing and adding notes, so we were relatively confident in our delivery. From a production standpoint, how the team went about creating and iterating our presentation deck as a group felt clunky. For finals, we’ve agreed to try a new approach where we divvy up the presentation outline so everyone has very specific roles in the deck’s creation. This will hopefully minimize the heavy amount of in-person group collaboration time that we needed for halves deck. Faculty feedback as given in our instructor meeting could be broken in up to roughly three categories: Technology, Project Focus, and Iteration. Technology: There was a lot of frustration with our team moving away from the Apple Watch. This is something that we can…
Week 6 – February 21, 2022
1/2’s Preparation This week was pretty much dominated by our team preparing for halves. We made four major iterations on our original slide deck and met multiple times with both Heather and Dave to refine the story of our progress. Working on our halves presentation highlighted where our team was lacking on our designs. After some group discussion, Constanza came up with a game plan to better define our guest’s meditation experience. User Experience Constanza began mapping out the user journey and creating a master list of potential biofeedback indicators. The list is split into several categories including Plants, Animals, Abstract, and Territory (which constitute environmental changes). The next step will be triaging these indicators based on resource requirement, concentration, position, and the biometric mapping type. Biometrics and Sensor Integration On Friday, Gillian and Zibo met with Patrick, a pranayama meditation guide and Equa Health researcher, to discuss using the…