Welcome to Lights Out! This project began last semester during the ETC pitch process, where we realized that a nonvisual, multi-sensory location-based project could produce something really new and compelling. We are opening the semester with as much research and testing as we can think of and by the end of the semester we will have built a full experience that we will share at the ETC Fall Festival.

The key focuses of our semester are going to be smell, touch, and hearing. We want to include all of these in some significant way in our experience. The genre and guest experience are not yet decided – we are going to experiment with these senses and see what we think will make a solid experience.

During week 1, we focused mainly on research. We did lots of research on our key senses including the scientific facts or experiments related to these senses as well as their application in the entertainment industry. We found lots of interesting things (some of them scary), and we brainstormed some very simple ideas for things we could try based on this research.

We started with some research on sensory deprivation. We have a darkened room in which we will build and show our experience, and just being in that room can be frightening. There have been many studies done on sensory deprivation, and as it turns out, humans don’t handle being isolated very well, especially in darkness and quiet. Luckily our experience will have enough nonvisual input that the negative psychological effects shown in these studies shouldn’t be an issue for us, but it’s something we are glad to be aware of.

Smell is actually the most sensitive of human senses – in that we have hundreds of types of smell receptors and only a few light and taste receptors – and it’s strongly related to emotional events and earlier memories. This leads us to think that storytelling using smell could be very powerful because smells trigger people’s emotional responses. We also know that humans, like other animals, can use smell to recognize things about others. We can not only identify others with smell, but we can also sense things like aggression through what are called chemosignals.

Unfortunately, we probably won’t be using chemosignals in this experience, so the first thing we plan to test is how accurately people can distinguish different smells as well as how different people experience smells in different ways. According to some studies, the smell of roses makes people feel safe and calm. Since we are worried about people feeling fear in the dark (which is very natural and not something we want as part of the guest experience), we could probably use a rose smell to decrease that feeling of fear.

As for sound, people can tell the direction of sound sources pretty easily. We have actually already done some preliminary tests of shooting Nerf darts in the dark aiming at sound cues, and the four of us are pretty accurate. We’re going to do more testing on this next week. We would also like to see how accurately people can identify an object’s material only from the sound it makes.

Touch is something we have only begun to cover, because it can mean texture or balance or heat or many other things. We’re pretty confident that people can feel the shape and texture of objects without vision, so solving puzzles in the dark can be something we want to try. We also had the opportunity to visit the lab on CMU’s main campus that is working with electrostatic vibration, a special screen and system that can cause a smooth glass screen to feel like different textures. We are not yet sure if this technology has a place in our experience, but we are definitely looking forward to trying it.

An interesting article we found was about sensory experiments that you can do with your kids. In this article the interesting experiments was to play with temperature, by placing one hand in hot water and the other in to cold, then put them into room temp water. This leaves the hands with the feeling of the temperature of the water as a residual sensation in the hands. This holds interesting possibilities for our experience.

Note from design: “Don’t play it safe” – that became our direction after meeting with our advisors, Chris and Heather. At this meeting, it was decided that we will do at least 1 prototype per week. I came up with some raw high concepts along with other team members of what we can build through short time cycles. We already did one playtest; shooting Nerf guns in a dark room, aiming with sound cues. We have also tried eating meals in the dark together as our advisors suggested. It’s definitely a unique experience. Many tests will be done. A good start.

Note from art: In addition to helping with research, I have started to think about branding and how to construct some of the ideas that we came up with in the brainstorming session. I have also been considering the layout of the room we are building in and what would make the most sense for showing at Fall Festival. With this research under our belts, I’m already very excited to work with the team to find new and innovative ways to have guests experience the other senses that they may not use nearly as much as their sense of sight!

Next week: sound experiments!