Hello!

This week was… well it was a big week for us, and all the other teams at the ETC. Why you ask?  Well, at the ETC we have a pretty big event called Soft Opening, which is where we show off our *mostly* done projects to faculty, and anyone else who wants to see.   In our case, anyone else means EA employees.  We had about 24 people come by, and managed to get a ton of playtest data.

Specifically, we ran two playtests – Companion Vs Guide role, and Positive vs Negative Personality.  

The first test was focusing on polar opposite objectives.  The Guide’s job is to get you through the experience, making sure you see every piece of information available, and in a timely manner.   The Companion’s role is to avoid you at all costs.  If you go to the panel he is at, he’ll leave immediately.  There is no way to finish the experience, and the role is designed to be as frustrating as possible.  Surprisingly, the companion was found to be more engaging, despite trying as hard as possible to avoid the guest.  Otherwise,  a lot of what we found aligned with our hypotheses, that both would be seen to be focused on the museum over the player.

For the second test, we focused on very positive personalities, happy and excited, vs the very negative ones, like sad or scared.  As expected, the sadder personalities were seen as less engaging, with excited being the most engaging, and sad being the least.  Some interesting notes would be that the scared personality, which struggles to remember relevant information, and appears unsure of itself was much more engaging than we predicted.  Our thoughts on this, are that when the scared personality struggles, it forms a kind of interest curve.  Since the nature of the project requires he does remember the information, when he struggles, there is a moment of conflict – will he remember?  Perhaps this struggle makes a guest pay more attention?  More testing is needed to confirm this.

Some overall notes on the experience are worth going over as well.  The audio is still a problem area, and we are considering using headphones in the future.  The Hololens speakers are not our friend here. Agents who had mood changes often and rapidly presented information no less clearly, but engagement went down significantly in such cases.  Also, the Happy personality presented information the least clearly, which we did not expect.

If you’re a spreadsheet kind of person, here’s a spreadsheet with our playtest data!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/171V2B0GXiKxUnQqS8h9YuAt-N8D-s1tjxVz3i5k_Flk/edit?usp=sharing

Next week will see another playtest, hope you check back.

~mixAR