Hi Everyone!

Welcome back! It feels like the semester is flying by– we’re already on week 6! We’ve been working hard to get ready for Halves Presentations next Monday afternoon.

Art

After a lengthy team discussion and consulting with both playtesters and faculty, we initially decided on the message in a bottle concept. With this idea in mind, we worked on how to unify it with the concept of the phone. However, we are going to take another look at trying to make the visuals lean more abstract.

Script

We are focusing on trying to build up the character and make the character arc seem natural. We are also trying to infuse humor in the script. To help explore the experience design, Dave recommended that we build a design document that features sections for explaining why we believe the guest will react in the way we want them to do so, what they may do differently, and how to mitigate variation in guest responses. We also discussed content generation and understanding how to get interesting responses from guests that others will want to listen to. While we refine the script, we hope to be able to develop it to a state that people are able to respond to the questions with some ease and be able to tell stories from their life.

Room Design

We are setting up mood boards and researching furniture in order to get the overall feel that we want for the room.  Here’s what the room looks like currently:

Technology

We have implemented several aspects of the technology into the experience so far. We have voice recognition, but it’s limited to simple yes/no or similar forms of agreement/disagreement.
Right now, we’re working with AI to see if we can use predefined keywords and topic modeling to trigger alternative narration. This is something that we are testing with, but are not sure if we will proceed with. We are changing the foundation of the program to include the idea of “topics” with response categorization. This will categorize by questions instead of categorizing our users.

We are implementing disclaimers, to inform the user that their response will be recorded and they will have the option to opt-out. This was brought up to us during Quarters as we don’t want quests to feel “tricked”. Since we are moving away from identity labels, we will be removing the aspect of the technology that categories the users by their identities. This will help us limit the need for specific voice recognition and from stereotyping guests. The phone we decided to use has a push button system, rather than a rotary dial, to help guests intrinsically understand the button pressing mechanic. 

Sound

We have made progress on the archive sounds. We are trying to incorporate the water feel from the visual into the soundscape during the answer period. We mainly added ambience sounds related to water because we decided to go towards the direction of water elements.

Questions

We’ve been playtesting our questions for the experience trying to figure out which questions are most engaging and how to phrase them in order to get stories instead of concise answers. The ideal response would be a roughly one minute exploration on why the guest feels the way that they do and an example from their life. We want the questions to be clear enough that guests are able to come up with responses relatively quickly, so that they don’t give up and say, “well, I have nothing.”

Faculty Meeting

Most of this week’s meeting was going over our presentation and giving tips on how to format it and present well, specifically going over our slidedeck and making sure we have the right information on it.

Playtesting

Mike Christel came to playtest our experience. He said we need to give more branching narrative lines in case the guest does something we don’t expect. He also felt suspicious of the narrator, citing phone scammers as a cause of anxiety, and believed that the water visuals would feel scary.

Halves Presentations Preparations

We have finished making our slides for our presentation, and we practiced our presentation in the RPIS for one of our advisors. He gave us lots of helpful tips, mostly with where we should stand and how we should move during the presentation .

Conclusion

We are working hard to come up with the best product we possibly can. For anyone interested, we will be presenting Monday afternoon with the stream starting at 1pm EST. You can find the stream here. (stream link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjHnzWblXz4 )

Have a good weekend. See y’all next week!