This week, we made a lot of progress toward our final goal. We got a lot of input from five different company visits – Amazon Twitch, Universal Creative, ILM xLAB, Take-Two, and Activision. They gave us a lot of great ideas and made us even more excited to be working on this project, and we thank all our visitors for their time!

We also got the opportunity to meet with Miguel Reyes from the Blind and Visual Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh, where he helps people who are visually impaired learn to move around in this sighted world. He showed us so many tools and strategies that they recommend for people who are visually impaired, including handheld proximity sensors that vibrate when you get near something, auditory signage and barriers that are triggered on proximity or touch, and tactile maps which use texture to turn a visual map into something that can be explored and learned through touch. We really appreciate his time and hope to put what he showed us to good use.

We already used the tactile map as part of this week’s playtest! This was our final playtest for the exploration phase, and next week we are pulling together everything we have learned through research and playtesting and deciding on mechanics and a story. Once we have a final design we will submit a budget for approval and start building! We will also prepare for 1/2s presentations the following week.

From art:

During week 7 on the art side of things, we spent most of the week working on ideas for the last playtest that we would be having, before we change over to working on the final room. We also used some of the time this week to start putting together a list of materials that we could submit to the faculty to be able to start building a room that can be broken down and taken wherever we want.