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. Only Dave showed an increase in respiration rate. Seeing Dave’s increase in respiration rate guided us towards a few changes in our summary and sparked some debate over how we should present information to meditators if their biometrics haven’t improved. Brenda gave us some pointed feedback about the environment, especially the skybox, which led to some shifts in color palette.
UI/UX
Some other changes that occurred this week involved the addition of icons for the “See,” “Hear,” and “Feel” sections of our meditation. These icons will hopefully eliminate confusion between the 3 chapters of our meditation experience and the 3 tenets of Unified Mindfulness that we discuss at the beginning of our meditation. We’ve also added a “Play Period” at the beginning of the meditation that tells users exactly what features in the environment are connected to biofeedback and allows them to play with their breath’s effect on the environment. This Play Period is not used in calculating the breathing baseline of our users and is not reflected in the final summary graph.
Optimization
Lauren and Zibo continued to optimize the assets for our final Quest build. Currently the framerate is 20fps, but is otherwise functional. As Lauren replaces trees and gets rid of polygons, the frame rate should increase. Our goal by the end of next week is to have a frame rate of 30fps.
Trailer
This week the team finished the trailer for the project. Gillian wrote the script and recorded and edited Faris’ narration. Faris made the background music. Lauren shot and edited the video.