theatre.exe

Final Presentation

We had our final presentation this week!

We tried to take into account our softs feedback and made diagrams to make our project as clear as possible:

Softs

We’re wrapping up! We used a set of slides to describe our project this week during softs.

Softs slides are here.

-Team

Collaboration with project partners

We received feedback from our project partners and worked with them to make some last adjustments to the design concept and solidify our understanding of the experience as a whole. We’re really pleased to have come to a point in collaboration where questions about tech and agency are raised and discussed by everyone together.

Once again an overview of our progress is summarized in the below table:

-Team

Production

We reviewed a lot of the ideas we’ve come up with over the course of the semester that have not been fleshed out into prototypes or concepts and decided to compile them into one long document for posterity. The team has done a lot of work we are proud of and we are looking into better ways of showcasing the ideas!

-Healthy & Tina

Collaboration with project partners

In this week we are in a third round of iterations with our project partners!

We made much more specific decisions this week about the exact framework with which guests will influence the narrative, and came up with corresponding tech ideas to make the mechanism for the guests to use.

Prior to this week, the team and our project partners have been taking turns responding to each other’s ideas; it was interesting this week that our ideas have begun to merge and we are collaborating a lot more closely and making a lot of decisions together.

-Team

Production

This week it seemed quite clear that we should focus on iterating on the same aspect of this narrative idea for next week until soft opening. This prevents us from re-building from the ground up. We would also not lack variety in our ideas because the one agency moment we focus on involves different mechanisms for each main character.

-Healthy & Tina

Collaboration with project partners

We’re on our second round of iteration on ideas with our project partners!

The narrative and concept for the experience is shaping up to be much larger in scope than what would practically be built, and we all agreed that this is not a bad thing, as the goal of the project is not to build an experience but to discover and explore possibilities for agency and technology, and working on something that excites us all would inspire good ideas. We agreed that we consider our limits only to be the state of the art of any technology that exists right now, and are not considering practicalities like budget or availability of venue.

Our main strategy this week was to focus on one particular agency moment, identify the decisions we have to make and try to come up with a concept or procedure that is interesting but cohesive.

Below table shows our progress so far:

-Team

Production

We have adjusted our schedule for the semester to allow us to spend more time on the current concept, considering its scope.

-Healthy & Tina

Collaboration with project partners

We’re on our first round of iteration on ideas with our project partners!

Some things we noted during this process include:

1. It’s hard to have agency for the guests (of the very proactive sort that we are trying to aim for) unless we explicitly design for it
2. When we are unclear about the goals or motivations for the guests within the narrative, it becomes harder to think of an agency moment with purpose to support some ultimate takeaway for the guest
3. It’s generally helpful to know as much about the narrative as possible, so that considerations can be taken for the technology. Some technology look impressive, which could be useful in certain contexts; some tech is easily concealed. 

-Team

Production

We originally opted to keep our hours the same, but recent changes have allowed us to make more regular core hours:

We will be on Zoom at the same time as a team during core hours and be on Slack during our own personal hours.

We’ve started a scrum board on Trello, but expect to do most of brainstorming during our time online together as a team. Tello will become more useful once we break down work into individual tasks. 

-Healthy & Tina

Adjusting to working online

As of this week, our project is adjusted to accommodate working from home per the CMU policies implemented as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are doing our best to look out for each other and hope everyone reading is OK.

The team will be meeting on Zoom Monday, Wed, Friday at 9:00 am. Instructor meetings will continue as usual. We’ll be staying on Slack during core hours, on Slack less strictly during personal hours.

Direction for the project

We’ve opted to keep what is unique about our project – the focus on live performance, despite not being able to test because of social distancing policies.

Instead of prototypes, we’ll focus more on ideas, which can be a beneficial thing for the creativity for this project.

Format for deliverables

• Disney imagineering competition-style slides, detailing design, perhaps with concept art, tech specifications
• Scope: We will scope as if a team with sufficient funding and time would be available. We would go beyond the scope for an ETC team and note that in our design docs.
• Completeness: The design will necessarily be incomplete due to inability to test with live performers and guests. We will take the prototype as far as possible, and take advantage in the freedom that working in theoretical terms proves us.

Detailed format for slide deliverable (slide template here):

Adjusting how we work with our project partners

To ground the ideas for technology, and to encourage serving a narrative purpose with technology, we are changing the starting point of our process from an idea from us to a narrative by our project partners. We will look at a narrative by our partners and search for moments of agency and technology within that context.

The benefit of preparation we’ve done in the first half of the semester is becoming apparent: we needed discussion to be on the same page in terms of agency, and we needed the review of examples from the industry to better understand what our project partners need.

-Team

Production

We’ve prepared a new schedule, tentative until we speak to our instructors and partners:

Overall schedule:

Weekly schedule:

-Healthy & Tina

Heading into spring break…

We’re making sure we take a break in spring break but had a team meeting and left ourselves topics to think about:

• List of ideas 
  • Can any of the problems from immersive theater Sam and Gab suggested to us, be solved by one of our ideas?
• List of technology
  • We have a better idea of the type of technology that would help facilitate guest agency; we could update or start a new list of technology
• Final article
  • At the end of the semester we plan to write up our process into an article; to prepare for that, we are starting the document (permission required) now and will add to it throughout the remainder of the semester

Prototyping pipeline

Our pipeline continues and will continue to evolve! Decisions we need to make:

• Get feedback before building? 
  • It seems like it would help us to get feedback early, when we are at the concept stage, about which ideas are most promising for prototyping.
• Start from the narrative? 
  • It’s important that the tech does not become like a gimmick – that is, unnecessary to the narrative or causing the narrative to bend over 

Prototyping 2 Feedback

We weren’t able to meet with Sam and Gab this week, but we got written feedback (permission required) for prototype 2!

Our takeaways:

• The application for this prototype seems limited because the interaction is on the surface simple and unearned
• To provide a powerful moment of agency, guests require more obstacles to finding the hidden information
  • We could potentially address this if we can solve a tech problem, where we need to hide the object completely and only show it in the photo album – or when it’s printed
• Possibilities lie in what the guests do with the discovered hidden information – whether they hide it from each other, or if the information contradicted or reinforced the story of a live performer
  • We thought this was brilliant and totally in line with some of the possibilities we thought of, so whether this prototype goes forward or not we’re excited to talk more!

-Team

Production

Halves

We had our halves presentation today! We tried to emphasize that everything we did, from our prototype to research to taxonomy, was centered around our research goal to combine agency, performance, and technology in a meaningful way.

Meetings

We’re trying to improve the way we have meetings; we implemented rolling meeting notes with meeting times, attendees and agendas. This method was directly based on what we learned from the ETC’s Production and Leadership course.

Long meeting times seemed to be an issue earlier in the project because it has the feel of a lot of effort for no results. We think noting meeting times might help morale because it shows our meetings can conclude on time; furthermore, using an accumulating rolling meeting notes and highlighting decisions we made in the notes might help us see the progress we make with each meeting and prevent losing sight of decisions already made.

-Tina & Healthy

Prototype 1 Feedback

We got really inspiring feedback about prototype 1, Emote Me from Sam and Gab! We’re particularly excited about the possibilities that came out of our discussions: 

• Embodying controls – match each control with the emotion it represents.
  • For example: Confetti for happiness, buckets of water for sadness.
  • The Makey Makey is really flexible in this area – anything slightly conductive can be made into a key, from food to water to human bodies.
• Building points of decisions into the experience so that guests will take cues from the performer
• Have the performer be able to influence the emotions too
• Have two performers interacting with each other
  • This might work well with an emotional situation such as a breakup

Prototyping Pipeline

We’ve made some decisions about our prototyping pipeline:

• Rapid prototyping: We will make prototypes quickly from a list of ideas and move on
• Feedback: We will demo prototypes to Sam and Gab for feedback from the narrative perspective
• Reiteration of select prototypes: We will select promising prototypes in the second half the semester to reiterate on.

Prototype 2: Snapshot

After a round of brainstorming, we’ve decided on a new prototype that should result in something very different in format from our first. 

Concept:

Guests take photos to discover hidden secrets that reveal or will change their perception of the story.

Description:

Guests take seemingly normal photos of objects but discover in their photo albums that invisible objects are revealed. This differs from typical AR games in that the intention is not to show the alternate reality constantly through the camera, but to reveal it in snapshots in the photo album. The live performance part comes in when guests also interact with characters who are part of the story they are revealing.

Potential additional feature:

The original intent was that the digital camera be hidden altogether, and the AR is printed out on a Polaroid photo. We’ve scoped this out of this initial iteration for now, but consider it quite possible for a future iteration.

Technology:
AR Foundation on Android phone. Unity.

The tech part to render a processed AR image but not show it on the screen proved challenging, and may need a workaround.

We concluded our Friday mini-game jam with our prototype mostly built! We will wrap it up over the weekend.

-Team

This week we moved more fully into the prototype phase of the project, though, of course, we expect to continue to update the knowledge base whenever we encounter something interesting.

Prototyping process

We’ve decided that in our prototyping process we would mainly handle the technology part and consult Sam and Gab for the narrative part.

We made our first prototype, documented it and sent it to project partners Sam and Gab.

Prototype 1: Emote Me

Concept:

The guests have control over the actor’s emotions.

Description:

Five guests can change the amount of sadness, joy, anger or fear an actor feels by pressing on actuators. The actor is cued on the dominant emotion by the screen and changes their performance (or potentially their words) accordingly.

Technology:

Makey Makey. Unity.

Full documentation

-Team

Production

• We had our first encounter with difficulties with team dynamics, that we will try to work through this week by having a team meeting or mediated meeting as soon as possible. (Note: To protect the team’s privacy this is all we will document publicly on the subject.)

-Healthy & Tina