Month: December 2018

Our final week consisted of three major things: presenting Picture Yourself at Finals Presentations to the ETC Faculty, finalizing the animatic / ad video for our client, and completing our documentation for our client handoff.

Finals Presentations:

In presenting our product to the ETC Faculty, we were very honest with what went right and wrong over the semester.  We talked about how, conceptually, the product is very strong and that people support it, but that our prototype is not functional to the extent that we would like it to be.  We discussed about how Kinect gave us problems in development, as well as the potential alternatives to this software:

• Interactive stand (i.e. trackball): A straightforward, yet creative solution would be to have a stand engineered (ideating off of the suggestion we received from Deep Local).  This could be a stand that the iPad sits on, but it also could be placed directly next to the iPad stand (example floorplan below) that guests could interact with immediately after the iPad interaction.

Then, trackballs could be machined into this stand, with electric wiring running from these into the screen.  This allows guests to zoom in and out of the display from this stand, without moving, although the presence of more wire presents its own challenges.

• Interactive Touch-screen: A simple solution would be to allow users to step up directly to the wall and interact with their photo and the display simply by touch.  We would use projection sensors so that the current technology is still compatible with the interaction.
• iPad touch: An even simpler solution (on a very base level) would be to allow for guests to move the wall display directly from the iPad screen.  This solution is the least creative, so it would not be our first recommendation, but it can be a fail-safe suggestion if others don’t work.

In further discussions with Dave Culyba and Ricardo Washington, the mistake we made over the course of the semester became crystallized:

It was less about playing it “safe” because we indeed wanted to try creative technology, creative phototaking, and other higher-idea solutions because we felt that that was how we’d get a “wow” factor to get interest from guests.  If we play it “safe”, it becomes ordinary.  Our mistake was that, after finishing the initial concept phase, our focus became: “we need to finish this experience as soon as possible to then able to test the whole thing.”  Instead, what we needed to do was test each individual component – such as platform (testing for Kinect’s limitations), visuals (what gets the most significant “wow” moment), user journey (which we did test), phototaking (what do guests like to do in their photos), etc.

We needed to figure out how to best to design these components before making the whole thing.  Then, we could’ve found pitfalls earlier and (maybe even) found a better way to “save” Kinect through specific motions that work better with the software (we tried to use head-tracking and this made Kinect very unhappy).  At least, we would’ve found alternative solutions to it earlier (and definitely would have planned for alternatives earlier as well).

Final Animatic / Ad Pitch Video for Our Client

Going off of the feedback we received from our client after showing them our video last week, we updated it to make it feel a little more clean and polished:

Final Documentation

Documentation was finalized this week to include design ideation, sketches of our live space ideas, a step-by-step guideline of the process, customizible aspects, and technical details for install, platforms, and troubleshooting.

Going Forward / Postmortem

Our client will be able to use our documents along with the video to showcase our idea to vendors around Pittsburgh, and hopefully “Picture Yourself” will evolve even after our time with it is over.  We didn’t do as much as we wanted to, but we know that this idea, at it’s base, is solid.  We hope that, overtime, “Picture Yourself” could become a permanent exhibition in the CMU community.

Thank you Beth Wiser and Brian James for your support, as well as our faculty advisors and other people that gave us advice throughout the semester.  Until next time:

The Work This Week:

The work this week consisted of constructing our animatic/ad pitch video for our client.  We also had ETC Festival on Wednesday, where we got to present what we made to many guests in the building.

Animatic Video:

We developed the animatic to be a pitch that our client can use to present to vendors and other people interested in our concept.  Therefore, we developed it thinking of the idea “what will you be able to do with this concept” rather than “here is what we did.”

In presenting the video to our client, they were impressed by how clear and succinct it was.  They just suggested on brushing up a couple of areas to make sure that certain ideas (i.e. displaying user information; how are we going to allow for customizable backdrops) come across visually.

We also presented them a new copy of our documentation, which we will continue to update over the weekend before our final handoff after finals next week.

ETC Festival:

We got to present our work at ETC Festival, which included us decorating our room a little bit:

Guests who participated in the experience were very supportive of the concept.  They understood that prospective students will be very interested in this idea, as it not only gives them something to do while they are waiting for tours to start but will indeed make them more interested in CMU.  Consistent feedback we got was to make the questions more specific, which will be included in our Customization section of the documentation.

Going Forward:

We have our Finals Presentation to the ETC on Tuesday of next week, and we will finish our semester with our final handoff to our client on Thursday.  We’re looking forward to completing everything as strongly as we can.

The Work This Week:

This week, we received some unfortunate news.  After our Soft Opening, the faculty informed us that, given that we only have two weeks left this semester, it will be impossible for us to finish our software/prototype development to a point that it is truly clean and polished.

Of the many problems that came up at Softs, Kinect might have been the biggest culprit.  It was clear that the platform was oversensitive, and faculty discussed how it made the experience confusing and sometimes even dizzy.  There was also disappointment that the display that we have in place does not have an elegant, clean way of visualizing user information.  Lastly, there was concern that it just wasn’t aesthetically pleasing – especially on the projected screen, the display looked flat with a lack of depth.

Yet, people still generally love the concept of this design, how it can connect members of the CMU community, and how beautiful it can be.  So, the suggestion was that, for the last two weeks of the semester, we develop an animatic to showcase what this idea can be.  This will basically be an ad pitch video that our client will be able to present to vendors and developers in the future.

When we spoke to our client later in the week, they were supportive of this new direction, as well as the work we did.  They agreed that the cleaner it is, the better and that the key is that they need to be able to sell it once our semester is done.

To them, we had two goals when we started this semester.  The first was the proof of concept and to them, that was a success because our ideation gave them a lot to think about as to what is possible in that space.  The higher goal was to have fully functional software ready to take over content management, which could easily be customized.  We didn’t quite reach this goal – we’re in the gap between ideation and functionality.

“This is not ready for the public yet, but the fact that we are at the point where we are tweaking the software and physical setup – this means that we have the concept right,” said Brian.

For our animatic/presentation, our client suggested that the pitch is:

• Self-explanatory
• Includes narration
• Covers future development
• Features the next step of intention

For the inclusion of backdrops, it was suggested that we switch from using pseudo-postcards that feature them to possibly utilizing a green screen effect, maybe on the wooden board that we’re planning to place next to the pillar.  Either way, our client said that we should find a way to use the actual photos of CMU campus in the backdrop, rather than illustrations.

Lastly, our client wasn’t ready to make a firm commitment to ClearStory just yet, saying that there are more moving parts to that decision than just them, and that they have additional potential vendors they need to speak to as well.

By the end of the week, we had developed a script and structure for our video/animatic.  We’re planning on focusing on the visualization/wall display aspect of the idea first, as that part of the design was the most troublesome.  The video itself will cover some short snippets of the live space, explaining the concept, before showing what a potential user will do on the iPad and that in terms of interacting with the wall.  This video will be 2D, but we are going to use some blur effects to give a feeling for depth for the visualization aspect of the experience.

Going Forward:

Next week will be the development and finalization of this video/animatic.  Additional, we need to prepare our Finals presentation and also finalize our documentation.  We have a draft of it that we presented during Softs and to our client, but additional elements, especially the technical aspects of it, need to be developed.