This week (Feb.28 – Mar.6) we spent most of the time preparing for the 1/2 presentation. We used the weekend to finish the last bits of the department and recorded a demo video. We also went to the Carnegie Science Center to get inspiration from the physical museum experience.
Field Trip
The field trip to the Carnegie Science Center was fun and inspiring. We paid a lot of attention to how they designed each section around a specific topic and how they used light and shapes to guide the guests through the whole experience. We noticed that there were tons of animated stuff in each section, and all the interactions looked intuitive with no cost of learning new things. Also, they managed to keep every game or interaction small and delicate, so that guests’ attention was constantly drawn from one thing to another.
1/2 Presentation
We worked on the presentation slides separately just as discussed and assigned last Friday. We then meet up and talked through the slides after the field trip, and used all the core hours after that to practice and rehearse on the presentation. We also rehearsed the presentation at the weekly meeting with Brenda and she suggested changing the order of the slides to show our demo after the intro and give the faculty a clear image of what we are building at the very beginning and explain them afterward.
Feedback
We got our feedback from the faculty on Thursday and had a zoom discussion with Brenda right away. The summarized feedback are listed below (order marked as the priority as we comprehended):
1. The whole project seems way over-scope, they doubted that we can finish what we outlined
2. The multi-players and message systems are unnecessary and out of the time and resources we have
3. It’s hard to incentivize scientists to share content on this platform and communicate to users
4. The art style shown in the demo video did not align with the art design
5. We did not present in a professional way, looking at the monitor too much. And the slides need to better deliver the speaker’s points.
Although most of the comments came in of a negative mood, we felt that most of the concerns were there because we didn’t make some points crystal clear and thus confused the faculty. For example, we are building this experience as a platform for scientists like Samira so that they can be heard by more people. Filling in the content and calling on scientists to participate is NOT our job here. But we do need to better clarify some key points and choose the word more carefully for our final presentation.
We all agreed that we are clear on what we’re building and our vision is not that over-scoped. We will keep following the roadmap and make adjustments when it is necessary.
Plan for next
We will take the spring break after the halves. At the same time, Yukti will finish the rigging of the character and programmers will try to set up the ETC server for hosting the experience.