This week we hold our first internal playtesting session to verify that people can understand our mapping from Y axis to pitches. We invited 6 testers to our project and got very positive feedback from them. All of them got the idea that the height of Y axis is the pitch. And we also tested on different music instruments as our main melody instrument. They gave very useful feedback as well. They all thought that if we want to use instruments like flute instead of piano, we should consider limit our range of pitches because that flute sounds too sharp when it hits a very high pitch. After that, we adjusted our pitch and range, and YES, the music sound more harmonious.
Also, we started working on verifying our z-index feature. After heated debate, we decided that we need another camera to help user to see the model from the top view besides existing front view. With this additional view, users can understand the z-index. Also, we will add signs of different instruments to the top-down view. The reason why we don’t show z-axis and y-axis together in one view is that we found that people are not adapted to viewing 3D model with both dimensions at the same time. They lose sensing the thickness and height at the same time.
For music part, we added dynamic z-axis feature, however, it doesn’t sound very obvious to users. We will test this feature next week with visualization.
Moreover, we finally decided that we want to conclude our work into a paper and submit to a conference. We believe that we are doing something unique and worthy sharing to the music visualization community. It is a good way to get to know more people in the community and increase our publicity.
In this demo, we added more details to our red dots and blue dots, and also we fixed numerous mesh analysis bugs affecting our performance and accuracy. There are a lot of bugs behind the scene have been fixed. Now we are finally proud to say that our mesh analysis is pretty accurate and fast now.
Challenges
Time is tight and we still want to achieve a solid experience for users. We want to deliver a high quality experience to users and all the things we did are very new. We trudged through a lot of failures. However, we are still confident that we can achieve the high quality user experience goal.
Z-axis visualization is very tricky, and we need to convey that information to users precisely. We already tried several solutions but they didn’t work very well. Yet we are more and more sure that what kind of effect can be very useful in the future.
Schedule for this weekend and next week
Top-down view with instruments indicators.
Camera lock for better viewing and editing experience.
Drag to set start point to music. (High demand from users).
