Author: xiaob

This week on Saturday, we had our ETC Playtest Day! Playtest Day is a proud tradition of ETC during which we invite guests of all ages to visit us, take a tour of ETC, experience our projects and share with us with much appreciated feedback.

For our project, we asked for adult playtesters due to the mature content we had in some of the episodes of Relationship Status. We conducted 40-minute testing session with each group of playtesters (from 3 to 6 people). During each session, we started by asking the playtesters general questions regarding their habits using mobile application and watching TV shows. For example, “On which device do you usually watch TV shows?” or “What are some of your favorite shows?”

After that, we showed them Episode 4 of Relationship Status and walked them through our AR experience.

(Please refer to the video below to see the Playtest Day version of the prototype which we used for the session.)

 

We followed up by asking them to share their experiences interacting with our prototype. We gathered lots of interesting and useful feedback to help inform our design changes and iterations.

The major lessons we learned out of this playtesting session are:

1. Users do not always have access to a surface to start this experience.
2. Users don’t recognize or remember the objects from the show.
3. The relationship map and the questions don’t seem to have any meaningful connections.
4. There isn’t much to do after collecting the objects and answering the questions.

Based on our findings, we would be working toward another prototype in the coming weeks to address these issues and explore more possibilities.

See you next time!

This week is Quarters week. We were excited to showcase our design, research and tech demos for the ETC faculty.

We talked about our initial design approach in last week’s blog post. Besides that, we showed three early tech demos for the experiences we were prototyping.

VR Demo

AR Demo

MR (Mixed Reality) Demo

Then, there was a twist!
Our client suggested that we work with a new show “Relationship Status”.

“An interweaving cast of 20- and 30-somethings navigate the complexities of dating and relationships in the modern age of social media.”

We were surprised and delighted by this new direction. Previously we had been struggling find engaging experiences for QB1. However, we find ourselves so much more engaged with the new show, and this makes it easier to design for.

We also had to redesign our branding materials, but it was not too much of a hassle. Can you spot the differences?

NEW

OLD

See you next week!

At the beginning of Week 4, the team pitched an initial experience concept to our faculty members. We suggested that we could make a VR experience where users could enter one of the quarterbacks’ rooms and pick up objects that have special significance to that quarterback. When a user picks an object up, a video clip showing the importance of that object could play. Our faculty members agreed that this experience would be a good use of extra footage that did not make it into a QB1 episode, but felt that we needed to give the user a story to tie the footage together, as well as a choice that would allow the user to affect the story, in order for the experience to be engaging. With that feedback, we went back to the drawing board and came up with the following interaction loop:

In this loop, the experience would start with the user receiving a text from one of the quarterbacks, asking for a favor. To fulfill the request, the user will have to go into VR. Once the user has explored the VR environment, they can choose whether or not to successfully fulfill the request. Then, the quarterback will respond by giving something to the player, which the player can see through AR.

Here is an example scenario:

1. Tayvon asks you to go to his room and find his locker code, which he forgot. He needs to get into his locker to get his equipment for a big game today.

2. The user goes into Tayvon’s room in VR and searches for the code. After moving an object, the user finds a doctor’s note that indicates that Tayvon is injured, and shouldn’t play in today’s game. Then the user finds the locker code.

3. Back in text, the user can choose to either give Tayvon the code and know that he might injure himself further in the game, or refuse to give Tayvon the code so that he won’t play today.

4. Depending on which choice the user made, the user sees a video clip from – either Tayvon getting injured, or sitting out of the game.

5. Tayvon gives the user something in AR. For example, if he was able to play in the game (and get injured), he gives you the trophy the team won in the game.

While the exact experience is getting ironed out, the team knows that we want to try to use Google AR, Google Daydream (VR), and a messenger bot, so the programmers started prototyping simple interactions using these technologies. At the same time, the artists finalized the team’s branding materials, and started making assets to populate the VR and AR experiences.