This week marked another huge milestone for the Kaleidoscope team. On Monday, we conducted our very first playtest at the Kenner room (where the final installation will be located). In addition to the playtest, from a production standpoint, this is the first week that we completed our development from beginning to end. This allowed faculty and guests to try out the entire experience and gave feedback as a whole as opposed to bits and pieces. After several playtesting sessions, we’ve discovered the following:
- We need to give the guests a clear goal for the experience. What is the objective? This is to ensure that the guests will do whatever they can to achieve the goal
- The obscure image in the beginning of the experience is too vague, guests are unable to tell that the image is a human
- Dragging is really not intuitive, especially we’re asking the guests to drag from one location to another specific location
- Everything we include in the experience has to have some sort of meaning, if it doesn’t have the effect we want, we should remove it. (E.g., the wave on the bottom) we were trying to create depth using this moving wave but the guests interpret it differently.
- Sometimes it’s better to be succinct than poetic
This week we’d also like to take some time to talk about some of the successes, challenges and other observations / interesting things that we have discovered in the past 10 weeks.
Successes:
The team was able to utilize Intel Realsense camera for volumetric captured images and with the work of our talented TD, we were able to have different particle effects for the images
Challenges: The idea is solid but the experience is still lacking the emotional curve we’d want the guests to feel
-The sequence and the flow of the project from each action point to the next one
Interesting things: Many people have different views on our projects and the way they react to our project is very different as well.
From a production standpoint, we had a very productive meeting on Friday and came up with a flow that made sense and the right sequence of things (i.e, what action points should follow the next and when it should happen). Moving forward, this will be the new structure that we’ll be working on and testing.
