This week, we showed our work to guests during the ETC’s Festival event. Our client, Lisa, was also able to attend and got to try our latest version of the VR experience. She thought it was a great way to be able to visualize and really understand what the space will be like.

We are wrapping up all of our visuals and documentation, including our walk-through video. We are incorporating different forms of visuals and descriptive text to really give a brief but informative look at our design without us having to be there to talk about it.

Our final presentation will be on Monday, then we’ll be handing everything off to Lisa. The semester is coming to a close.

This week marked the Soft Opening for our project.

We displayed all the work we could from the semester: brainstorming notes, user research, personas and scenarios, technical and design documentation, visual samples, and of course our VR demo.

From the feedback we received, it was clear that the VR demo is falling short; it isn’t showcasing all of the work we’ve done, and the experience doesn’t come across clearly. Some people felt it was hurting more than helping, and suggested scrapping the demo altogether. VR can be useful to show scale, but we need to find the best way to convey our ideas. Multiple people recommended a video walkthrough that could show the installation and some of the interaction with additional labels and descriptions to accompany it.

As we approach Festival and Finals, we will be polishing everything we have and fleshing out further documentation such as alternative content recommendations for our client. We will also be creating the demo video as suggested.

As for the VR demo, we will be fixing resolution and viewpoint issues. We will likely remove the nighttime display from this demo unless we can create something that really demonstrates the concept well. Instead, we will be adding our concept art visuals to the video demo and documentation.

We’re on our Thanksgiving break, but still hard at work!

We’ve been getting content ready for the VR demo and getting more written documentation out of the way.

Soft opening is on Monday. Can’t stop now!

This has been a particularly busy week for us. We’ve been kicking production into high gear, as well as engaging in a lot of new meetings and discussions!

We started the week off by attending a workshop hosted by Second Story. They are now officially working with CMU on the new media installations, and they’re just launching into their own brainstorming phase. We got to talk to their team and watch how a professional group goes through this process. The workshop was also a great place to hear what the other interested parties were hoping to achieve with the welcome center. We heard a lot of familiar ideas, so we know we are on the right track!

We have also been working on our VR demo. We have our new media wall design implemented and are adding people to the space. The content is all placeholder for now. We should be adding actual sample content of our own creation at the beginning of next week.

The example content is coming along nicely as well. Smaller pop-up interfaces for guests to interact with are being designed for the wings. The interface will appear at eye-level for each guest who approaches the wall. For the central grid, we are creating larger visuals that will make use of the moving sections in interesting ways.

This week, we settled on a new hardware design so we can move forward on our deliverables and content.

For a while, we were moving towards a completely new idea: smaller digital screens made to look like picture frames, like an art gallery or museum. However, we were concerned that this would greatly restrict the types of content the installation could be used for. It also doesn’t have the right advanced technology and “wow factor” impact we are going for.

We re-thought our design once again. Our new concept uses our original moving grid, with curved, immersive, touchable “wings”.

The new “wings” will be possible with flexible OLED displays or similar technology. They will extend content to the ends of the display for the benefit of people approaching the wall from the side, as they will undoubtedly do so down this long hallway. They also create a central area that is somewhat more surrounded by the wall, making it more immersive. We can also use this area as our target-area for directed sound. We also feel that this new shape to the wall gives it a much more futuristic, high tech feeling, and it will still look interesting even if the displays are turned off.

We can also take advantage of the space behind the wings to add additional lighting effects.

We would like to use our art frame gallery idea from earlier today as part of our proposed content for the grid area. The depth control would allow for actual physical presence to be given to digitally created “frames”, thus enhancing the content. Sticking with this more standard wall as opposed to separate, individual frames also keeps the display versatile and re-usable for different forms of content for years to come. This was something our client was concerned about.

We are looking towards removing the table kiosks entirely and moving that content to the touchable wings. These kiosks so far have felt very secondary to the experience, and we believe consolidating the components will make it feel more cohesive. It will also allow us to give the wall itself a lot more consideration since our focus will be less divided. We would still like to include sitting areas within the space. We’re playing with the idea of enabling this standard furniture so that it can interact with the nighttime projections.

This week we’ve been focusing on finding new ways to push our designs even further.

Our design for this installation won’t be implemented for a number of years still. In that time, technology will be growing, changing, and evolving. We can’t just sit satisfied with the now. We have to think big and push the boundaries of what’s possible now to consider what will be possible then.

Some technologies we’ve been looking at will be smaller changes as far as the design goes, but bigger in terms of our hardware recommendations. For instance, we’ve been looking at OLED displays as a way to make our project more energy efficient, to give it a thinner profile, and even use their flexibility to enhance our media wall with more interesting shapes. This would also help the installation to still look interesting even if the displays are down.

Other technologies will add newer dimensions to what we’ve developed so far. We’ve been looking at new areas of research including touch sensitive fabric (possibly for sitting areas?) and 3D hologram-like displays (possibly for synthetic interviews with Andrew Carnegie and others?).

We’ve also been re-considering the use of sound in our experience. Part of what we love about the nighttime display is the potential to immerse the guest. Through the use of sound, we can immerse people further even during the day. Since it is a large public area, and generally persistent sounds would quickly become a nuisance to the people who work there on a regular basis, we’re trying to incorporate localized directional audio alongside our touchable panels and other specific components. A marked out region on the floor would naturally indicate a space for a guest to stand while interacting with content that would allow them to hear the sound.

Additional work done this week has included fleshing out our personas and polishing our VR building space. The project videos we’ll be needing to turn in at the end of the semester are also on our minds, so we’ve set up some time next week to tape some interviews with our client Lisa and other members of the committee.

In other news, CMU has finalized their contract with Second Story, and design meetings will take place in a few weeks. We’ll be attending to hear what they have to say and to present our own work so far.

Halves presentations are done. We presented our own work and watched our peers present theirs.

We have received a lot of feedback from our client, the larger Tepper Quad Media Walls Committee, and the ETC faculty. We’ve been looking it over, deciding which feedback is relevant or not and why, figuring out where we need to change course moving forward, and what we need to present better in the future.

Arim and Vivienne attended today’s ground breaking for the new Tepper Quad. Afterwards, they joined some prospective students for an info session and campus tour. This was a recommendation we received from Don Carter of the Media Walls Committee. We gained a lot of insight into the existing welcome experience, the kiosks and informational flyers they have, the questions the parents and students ask, and how guests react to the experience as a whole. This will greatly inform our refinement and creation of additional guest “personas” for our documentation and design decisions.

We’ve also been assembling some models to populate our welcome center. After today’s events, we should be able to create more that are similar to prospective students.

Created with Mixamo’s Fuse Software

Our halves presentation is on Monday.

Our virtual reality demo is well underway, with the initial building model fully integrated and the beginnings of multiple viewpoints, time of day changes, and more in the works.

Extensive user experience scenarios and “personas” have been documented.

Concept art for our current hardware design is being finished.

We’ve also worked out a weekly schedule all the way through to the end of the semester. It all feels quite clear and doable. We’re feeling good about where we are now.

A lot of presentation work will be done this weekend, then we’ll have the rest of next week to finally take a step back, watch other presentations, and manage a bit of a breather with a (relatively) lighter sprint.

We may spend a fun team bonding day making humanoid models in our likenesses to more naturally populate our virtual building.

Over the weekend, we attended Cèilidh. We got to talk to a lot of visitors, newer student families, and alumni.

Arim and Vivienne have been hard at work analyzing the survey responses we received and organizing them in a way that will inform our decisions about the experience we are creating.

Brandon and Brian, meanwhile, have been looking into existing architectural virtual reality demos as well as lighting and rendering. Many of these experiences use the Unreal Engine because of the level of visual realism it can provide. Our team, however, is more experienced in Unity, so we are looking into the more visually successful demos as a guide.

Laura has been working away at modeling the building space itself. It should be ready to integrate into our demos next week.

This month marks our road to Halves.

The pace is picking up. We now have a dedicated Oculus DK2 for our team. Our Unity project is set up in version control, and digital 3D modeling of the building space is underway. We should have the beginnings of our virtual reality demo soon.

On Thursday, we met the rest of the committee for the new Tepper building project. They were glad to get to meet us, and had a generally positive reception of our current concept work. The committee seemed particularly impressed with the lengths we are going to to understand the needs of our target demographic(s).

Speaking of which, we will also be having a booth at this weekend’s Cèilidh homecoming event at CMU. We will be talking to visitors and giving them surveys we’ve created. Hopefully we’ll gain some insight into the perspectives of alumni and visitors.

We have also received our promotional print materials. We will be bringing some of them with us.