This week we focused on ¼ presentations and creating tech demos. We also had a discussion about whether the current activities that we proposed are the right activities. We met Dr.Caridad who gave us some great advice, and we met people from the dev team of SimCoach who gave us some suggestions about transformational design.
Meeting with Dr.Caridad
Dr.Caridad has given a lot of good advice such as playing around with different variables (noise, crowd, etc.). Having different grades of intensity for the coffee shop is inline with traditional exposure therapy. He also pointed out that we should onboard participants with some physiological knowledge, like the bell curve of anxiety.
Meeting With SimCoach
We met developers, Lawrence and Pavan, from SimCoach on Tuesday. They are very interested in the data gathering part of the project. They also pointed out that we are answering the “WHY AR” question. We have learned a lot from them about transformational design
Why not a coffee shop?
There are a few problems that we see with creating an AR exposure therapy about ordering and chatting in a coffee shop.
- We don’t want to just copy exposure therapy and put it in AR
- Too easy to find in real life. To leverage the advantage of AR, we need something with higher stake
- Coffee is an important part of coffee shop, but it can’t be achieved in the AR experience
So what do we want to do?
- Focus on the intro activity, and playtest with it
- Looking for more advice from professionals
- Looking for activities with higher stake that can’t be done easily in traditional exposure therapy
¼ Presentation
On Friday, we presented our ideas to the faculty. We got both positive and constructive feedback. That can be divided into 4 categories.
- Who are the two parties? What role does the mediator play?
- Who is this for? What problem are we solving?
- A therapist tool? Can anyone play at any time?
- Does the experience help the participant or do they play it so we can gather data?
- Why AR?
- Less actors than traditional exposure therapy?
- Are we replicating events with high stakes that are hard to simulate in real life? (party, job interview etc)
- How to research?
- How do we test whether our experience has any effect on participants with just 1 session?
- Can we get to the point to draw conclusions?
Agenda for next week
- Brainstorm and design
- Meeting with Dr.Silk
- Meeting With Anthony Daniels