Practice your public speaking in Virtual Reality
[Production]
This week we finalized our product build, and installed all the hardware with the software files in A104 at Heinz College building.
Then we conducted a training session with the teaching assistants, along with the client audited in the room.
We also made user manual and technical instruction for TA to use next semester.
We recorded a tutorial video for their future usage as well.
[Production]
We finalized a playable version before the soft opening, in which the guest will be able to complete the full loop of practice and review.
We received some feedback from faculty, mainly hitting on:
Then we worked on iterating the build, and preparing documentation for handing over the application to our clients.
Meanwhile, we conducted another TA test sessions and collect evidence of the product effectiveness. We will give them further training along with the client next week, after we install all the necessary software on client’s VR practice room on main campus.
[Technical]
According the feedback we received from the soft opening, we implemented the multi-session menu as well as the summary page following into the experience loop.
[Production]
This week we invited ETC faculty to come visit our project, try our current prototype and asked them for advice in different aspects based on their specialty. Meanwhile, we communicated with our clients in terms of the final deliverable.
As a result of those, we debated and categorized on the features that we want to include in our final application. Eventually, after rounds of reasoning and scope estimation, we agreed on same things about what will the final product be like, as well as the priorities of implementation.
On the other hand, the hardware tracking was moving forward. Partial of the assets have arrived at Heinz Office. On estimate, we could receive them at ETC after Thanksgiving holiday. The graph below is showing the logistics of hardware transfer procedure:
[Technical]
[Production]
After gaining feedback from Summit and Community playtest, we discussed our next steps and critiqued on our scope for the following weeks.
In order to ensure the effectiveness of the product, as well as balance the workload of teammates, we decided to ditch some features that were secondary to our design pillars: enlightening, motivating and effortless.
After rounds of reasoning, we updated our latest user journey map:
(Click to see details)
We are planning to implement the features that are critical to the completion of an entire user loop before the soft opening.
Meanwhile, we did an onsite visit to the installation room located on CMU main campus and measured the dimension to ensure that the final product will deliver well during later handover period.
[Technical]
We implemented the eye gaze feature in the Review Mode in two main aspects:
1. Gaze cone visualization: direction of the presenter’s gaze is visualized as cone ray.
2. Object highlights: projection screen, laptop and clock will be highlighted when the present looks at them.
Next:
Attention ball change of state: the red attention ball will turn green when they get more attention from the presenter.
[Production]
This week we attended the CMU Teaching & Learning Summit at Rangos Ballroom on main campus. Onsite set up our installation, plan event flow and have the guest (including school wise faculty, staff and student) try our demo prototype. We received very positive feedback about people feel the product being useful and innovative.
We also welcomed community guests to play test our current prototype this Saturday. Their age ranges from teenager to adults. We collected their comments, thoughts and behavior, in order to further facilitate our design and implementation iterations.
[Production]
After the halve presentation, we met again with our clients. We encountered some agreements and some need to work on. Since clients still want the students feel a sense of realism as being watched during the practice mode, we need to produce a set of realistic style models in the practice mode. Meanwhile, keep the player avatar simple as it could tell the gestural behavior and head direction.
By the Nov 1, we will have a complete loop from practice mode to review mode, including start presentation, end presentation, review with interactive timeline with voice labels, and a post-review summary.
[Technical]
We implemented the timeline function so that the gestural movement and audio playback are syncing together with the timeline moments selection.
[Production]
This week team met and further refined our milestones based on the client’s need and our vision for the project.
We set up two milestones for the following weeks. One for the halve presentation at ETC next week, and one for the CMU Teaching & Learning Summit event on main campus that clients invited us to demo our product on Nov 1.
We summarized our production procedure from the beginning of this semester til this week, retrospected on the process and designed our slides for halve presentation. We reviewed our project goal and scope, organized the slides in a way that people with no previous acknowledgement could understand our approaches.
For the Nov 1, we set production milestone to be one complete instance for user to engage from start of practice mode to the end of review mode. In addition, users will be able to play through multiple sessions by the end of the production cycle.
[Technical]
Meanwhile we dived a little into metric generation for voice data collection.
[Production]
This week we met and set up our milestone for halve with client and adviser.
We will have a prototype flow from choosing practice/review mode to reflect on your performance with an avatar and informative UI visualizations.
We also prepare a design document to archive our design decisions.
We explored couple options of avatar appearance, worked on avatar generation pipeline and test timeline UI in VR.
After playtest with ETC students and negotiation with our clients, we decided to shift our project focus on the reflection mode.
We started to prototype with classroom layout and design metric visualization.
We sorted out possible solutions, estimated the cost and then set priorities of production.
We decided timeline as a major feature to implement in the review mode, as well as the head tracking system that passes data from practice to review mode.
[Production]
We had faculty walkarounds and sitdowns this week. We received feedback from them, summarized and came up with improvement solutions.
On the other side, in order to tailor our design more user-friendly and effective to achieve our project goals, we conducted a whole day play test activity at ETC.
We summarized the barriers from the testers and came up strategies to tackle with them. We referenced on “Transformational Framework” template and worked on distinctive tasks.
We reached out to experts and got more insights, deep interpretation of data, as well as how to use data. We gathered design documents for better conduct next week’s scrum cycle.
[Tech]
For this week, we refined our system structure into the following diagram:
So far, we were able to get this structure work with Watson. From the Watson API (Device), it transmits the dictation script to the Filter where it compiles the script (i.e. captures hesitation) and stores the data. Once the filtering is done, it sends the data to the Writer where it actually writes files to the local folder.
Nothing much is done this week since we had a huge shift in design direction. For next week, we will look into Social VR avatar and develop our filter logics.