The Lights Out project was pitched in Spring 2016 by students Andrew O’Rourke, Alex Amorati, Annie Wang, and Dasol Park with no client. It was carried out in Fall 2016 by Alex Amorati, Dasol Park, Annie Wang, and Dale Wones.

The premise of the project was that it was nonvisual, multisensory, and location-based. The semester was split into two parts:

1. 8 weeks of rapid prototyping in this strange design space and condensing our findings into one final design (delivering a Playtest Book)
2. 8 weeks of building out and testing a full experience to show at the ETC Festival and at conferences (delivering the experience)

We knew this was an aggressive schedule. From the beginning we agreed to focus on each sense in turn during testing, with increasing overlap and emphasis on story as we got closer to the end of testing. The final experience was meant to be relatively polished, but we were unable to accomplish the level of polish we would have preferred. All the same, the final experience and the playtest documentation show the design challenges we faced and how we made connections from individual playtests and research to the experience shown at Festival.

Our rapid prototyping was exhausting, but informative. During this half of the semester, we learned a lot about senses and guest expectations that helped us design for our final experience in the second half of the semester. Those findings can all be found in the Playtest Book. However, we also learned a lot about our process. We did well at cooperating and conforming to constraints (in terms of time, talent, and supplies). And we did very well at documentation, which allowed us to make the Playtest Book in the first place. However, we were brainstorming as a group and often without a specific goal, because our goals changed so frequently, and this made brainstorming a long and painful process most of the time. That, in turn, left us very little time to build what we needed for playtests and prepare to ask meaningful questions after the fact. Compounding this problem was that our already-aggressive schedule was further cut into by a lot of meetings and industry visits, which were cool and awesome! But they happened to fall very close together, making planning hard. We agreed as a group that moving forward we should set clearer goals as we tested, be more detailed in our designs, and plan further in advance in general.

The second half of the semester was just as exhausting but in a different way. Rather than having many different ideas and playtests, we had to focus on iterating on one idea to build and deliver for Festival. We got off to a late start by submitting our budget and getting it approved later than planned. However, we were able to keep to our schedule for the most part and had about 9 days to test and polish our experience between Soft Opening and Festival. We used that time to the fullest, because we were already used to making changes and building puzzles so rapidly from our first half. We stayed open to suggestions and constraints, which we think really helped us achieve a final experience that works for everyone. And we got outside help when we needed it – most notably from Heather Kelley and Miguel Reyes from BVRS (for research and subject expertise), Dave Purta (for wiring and building), and Alina Striner (for story and theming). We also planned ahead for Festival and two extra showing days so that these days went smoothly and the focus was on the experience and the guests.

We learned many lessons over the course of the semester, but we have identified as our most important:

1. To not depend on tech – we had the opportunity to use an electrostatic vibration screen from a research team on main campus. It is a touch screen that mimics different textures, which we thought would be cool to use for our experience. As it turns out, it made more sense for us to just use actual textures rather than a gadget.
2. To divide and conquer – this was touched on already, but brainstorming as a group (like we did for the first half) wasn’t nearly as effective as assigning different puzzles to different people (like we did in the second half) and entrusting everyone to do their part.
3. To never assume – guests will surprise you. We thought no one would eat anything without seeing it first, and we were wrong. Testing is crucial.
4. To plan ahead! – anything is possible if you have a plan, and a contingency plan.

We are grateful for the opportunity to work on this amazing project and to show it at the ETC Festival and our own showing days. We hope that the project will be able to travel to conferences in some form in the future as well – we want as many people as possible to experience it. We hope that this project added to a body of knowledge that everything doesn’t need to depend heavily on vision and that it is possible to have a full experience using only non-visual senses.

With Soft Opening this week, Lights Out has undergone some testing and changes that put us in a pretty good position for Festival and Showing Days next week.

At Soft Opening, projects show their deliverables to the faculty for feedback. We were able to have faculty members go through the experience for 7 minutes (a shortened version of what will be a 20 minute experience when we show it for real) and get their thoughts. It was clear that some of the puzzles needed tweaking – and that the wood needed a little work to not give people splinters!

The puzzle that needed the most work was smell. In its current form, there are many broken pieces of one disc that all have small vials tied to them, and the vials contain smells. The “correct” smell appears twice among the pieces and on the frame that would hold the pieces to make a complete disc. This was not only way too complicated of a process for most guests, but it was complicated in a tactile way, and the pieces tangled up a lot. The vials had corks in them, so it was hard to tell they could be opened, and without opening them, guests didn’t realize they were supposed to use smell! Even thought we had tested a version of this task before, we realized by the end of the day we would need to redesign the task.

The new task has several complete discs that are in separate cookie jars. Guests will be given a smell to come in with, which will match the correct smell, and the correct smell will be given as a sound cue as well. In addition, the inner ring of the incorrect discs won’t fit the peg on the door.

We left the story the way it is, but the sound underwent a lot of changes after our last visit from Alina and our softs feedback. We will have more narrations and we are adding environmental sounds (which also serve as clues) as guests approach each interesting station in the room. We found that it’s really difficult to remember the story after being submerged into a totally dark room, so we hope this will help guests remember where they are and what they are doing.

We also agreed (finally and after much discussion) to include light as part of the guest reward in the final room. Because the opening room represents a cold, dark heart and opening the door is a step toward warming it, it just fits our story to literally lighten the back room and show that the guests have really made a difference in his mind.

From design:

Based on the feedback we got at softs, we learned that the story is not clear and concise enough and there need to be more hints that help people do the puzzles and reinforce the story in the experience. Therefore, I worked on getting directional sound hints for each puzzle that involve the memories of the character. I also worked on the ending emotional narration audio to reinforce the finale moment of the experience. More reward sound effects were also added to the inventory to give feedback to the guests.

Also we began our video shooting process. The video will be edited and be finished next week.

Next week we look forward to testing our redesigned smell puzzle, our new sounds, and our final room as a full experience and showing it at Festival and our showing days!

Over the last two weeks, the Lights Out project has made some serious progress. Walls have gone up, puzzles have been tested and built, cameras and speakers have been installed, and the story has been finalized (with the help of Alina once again!).

In the Lights Out experience, guests will be geared up with lab coats, which is of course what mind doctors like themselves wear. The mind doctors will be transported by a machine into the mind of a man who has forgotten happy memories over the years, becoming grumpy and selfish. If they can collect pieces of all the happy memories, maybe they can unlock his heart and bring him back to happiness. The machine is unable to pick up any visual memories and only works for 20 minutes, so the mind doctors will need to work fast!

Guests will be led into the room and their hands will be placed on a tree of textures, which will guide them like neural pathways to the four central objects in the room: three key memory pieces, and one door to his inner mind which will open with the three keys.  Once the final door is open, the mind doctors will realize that there are strings leading them from any point in the back room to one table, containing not money, but a key – the key to his happiness. They’ve turned the old man back into his happy, youthful self!

It feels better than it looks.

And these smell better than they look.

The underside of the desk

We will be monitoring the cameras from our secret lair and will speak with guests through the speakers in the room should they be doing something harmful or should they need help. We have yet to figure out what kind of help we will give, since we haven’t tested the full experience yet, but we will probably use scripted lines that are delivered based on what they’ve accomplished in the time that has passed thus far. We will also be able to release the two electronic locks in the room from the back room once guests complete the associated puzzles.

A camera watches from above

We’ve been thinking a lot about throughput for this experience – we have finally accepted that it’s way too large to store the whole experience, so we need to make it count when it is set up. We will be opening at the ETC festival, then having additional showing days for the experience until it is taken down after final presentations. Hopefully this will let everyone have a chance to go through it. But, if people cannot return for the showing days after festival, or if they are uncomfortable with a sightless experience, we have considered other options. Our main project room will serve as a viewing area for people who want to watch a stream of what all our IR cameras see within the room as well as contain pieces of our playtests and our current experience (with blindfolds!) if people want to challenge themselves without committing 30 minutes to one room. We hope that this way we can meet everyone’s needs and share what we’ve learned with as many people as possible.

We look forward to presenting what we have so far at soft opening next week and playtesting until we are really ready for Festival!

It’s been a busy week!

We had several visitors this week, including Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies), Patrick Curry (previously from Unity Austin), and Seth Sivak (Proletariat / ETC alum). They reminded us of the importance of story and gave some advice on balancing meaning with red herrings in a puzzle-based experience. We also met with Alina Striner (Disney Research), who is helping us work on our story because we had once again gotten lost in the mechanics rather than the experience as a whole. We are meeting with her again next week for more input.

We have also finally begun construction!

Dale already put together two of the wall pieces! At this rate, we should have a complete set of walls by the end of next week.

Another update: we are hoping that we will not need blindfolds as part of the final experience while it is in the ETC! We have looked at the room and found places where light bleeds in, and it’s mostly near the main entrance. We have redesigned the shape of the room as follows:

The cutout in the top right was originally so that we could open and close the interior / exterior doors that were there, but it also serves as a light lock. Combined with curtains over the main door, we should be able to eliminate enough light that our guests’ eyes will not adjust.

We ended the week with a playtest that included prototypes of the smell and sound tasks we want to include in the final experience. Overall, many playtesters were able to complete the tasks!

More about this from design:

This week, sound and smell puzzles were designed.

For sound, we had a sound effect pass code using a keyboard. Guests would press one button to hear a clue about the correct pass code (“a dinosaur is racing an angry crowd with a spaceship”). There was another set of keys that would play the sound effects representing “dinosaur,” “racing,” “angry,” “crowd,” and “spaceship,” which was the correct pass code. There were also sound effects like “Pikachu” as distractors. Overall, the idea of the sound effect pass code is interesting and fun, but the feedback needs to be more clear (a submit button might be needed). But this can be developed.

The smell puzzle turned out to be an interesting mechanic also. People had to complete a circle by combining the two half-circles that smelled the same. There were also other pieces present with the same shape, but different smells. However, we found that the smell needs to be even more distinctive, plus if we want people to realize that they need to use scent, we need to make that very clear. One idea we have for that is that the puzzle base also could have the same scent. The material of the puzzle also needs to be a lot more solid (this version was made of foamboard), which will be implemented in the future.

Next week, we will be iterating these puzzles with prototyping the wall-touch puzzle.

Next week we look forward to more construction and prototyping!

This week, we focused on the design of the room and its puzzles. We visited the Center for Creative Reuse of Pittsburgh to start to build an idea of what furniture and props our room will be full of. It turned out to be even better than we had expected – so many things to reuse!

We also met with a group of first year ETC students who were interested in our project. They gave us a lot of feedback and helped us get excited about our project again!

From design:

This week we planned a playtest that aimed to test if people find the 3 objects (clues) in the final experience, then figure out the lock of the room. So we used a very simplified version of this puzzle – just a set of 3 shapes that needed to be matched to unlock the puzzle. We mainly wanted the testers to learn the room through tactile map, but because the map we had didn’t have the reference point and it was not fixed to the surface, it wasn’t used to help testers learn the room and the clue locations. Also, because the testers were young (8-12 years), they had short attention spans overall, which was pretty problematic. However, it was exciting to watch the groups who did complete the puzzle and some of them had some great moments during the experience.

We will have to find ways to design so that guests will not learn about the puzzle that they need to solve too slowly. This week, all the puzzles that will be in the final experience have to be detailed out.

From tech:

This week we mainly discussed how we will implement the door lock mechanism and what devices/equipment we will need to make it work. We did some research ourselves and we also talked with a faculty member Dave Purta, who gave lots of useful information to us. So now we have a pretty detailed plan on how to actually make it work.

Things we need:

• 3 5-position rotary switches

As stated in the title, these switches will have 5 positions that you can rotate it to. If we put it in a circuit and only connect one of its positions, then the circuit will only be completed if you rotate the switch to that specific position.

• An electronic door strike plate

These plates will enable us to “regulate access to doors by holding or releasing a lock’s latch with a signal from a push-button switch, keypad control, or card reader”. So we can control the opening of the secret door with these.

As for the design of the entire lock, we want the guest to do the following things:

1. Find 3 pieces that have different shapes by solving 3 puzzles in the room. The pieces will probably look like this:

The pieces are wooden shapes, with rotary handle on them that you can grab, and tactile bumps. (the green things in the picture)

2. Find a lock on the secret door that looks like this:

The wires and the power would all be on the back of the door hidden. The guest will only be able to feel that there are 3 concave shapes on the door that needs something to be filled in. There are tactile bumps on the top of each shape.

3. The guest will put the pieces in the door

4. The guest then rotate the plates with the handles to line up the tactile bumps.

Once all 3 plates are in correct place, the rotary switches embedded will all be connected, hence connecting the whole circuit and opens the door.

Next week we are looking forward to prototyping the rest of our puzzles and beginning to construct our walls.

The week of halves has passed and team Lights Out is transitioning to the second half of the semester – building!

We are continuing with our theme of a cabin, which was chosen because it is the closest to what the space actually will be (a wooden structure full of furniture we find). We are theming the story so that the cabin belongs to someone with a secret and a lot of high-tech security, which will help to explain the darkness and the need to leave the space quickly.

Here is a model that Dale built of the structure we will create:

Within this space, guests will solve about 5 total puzzles, based on past playtests like matching smells and identifying symbols by touch. Three (plus a tactile map, because that seems to be very helpful) will be in the main room, one will be on the door to the secret room, and the final puzzle will be in the secret room. The puzzle / lock on the door will require a combination of the three other puzzles in the main room.

We’re still hoping to have a darkened room, but if there is enough light that people’s eyes will adjust, we will keep blindfolding guests within the space. We’re also still planning to have this be a 20-30 minute experience for 1-2 guests at a time, but we may make a shortened version for the ETC fall festival.

From Tech:

This Thursday and Friday, we brainstormed a few ideas on possible puzzles that could be used in our final experience. Based on those, there are a few tech things we need to do such as controlling an electromagnetic lock; controlling a cuckoo clock and etc. These all seem really interesting and challenging and we definitely look forward to testing them as soon as possible.

We have finalized our budget and are hoping that it is approved early next week so we can begin building and testing!

This week was set aside for design decisions and preparation. We had no playtests, but we had a visitor from MC2 and had a very productive meeting with Dave C. He reminded us of the importance of having a design framework, so we spent the rest of the week creating design documents (like personas, user stories, and design pillars) and working to finalize our design that we will build for the end of this semester. We also spent a lot of time working on and preparing for our halves presentation next week.

In our 1/2s presentation, we want to emphasize our new design framework and how it is derived from all the work we have done during the first half of the semester, including research, feedback, and observations from playtests. We also want to show our current design so we can get feedback on it and make sure it is as good as we can make it before we finalize our budget next week.

From design:

This week we brainstormed and came up with the general idea of what we want to build for our final experience. Each of us brought some ideas of what to do. And the idea of using tactile map was something that we were all excited about. I personally brought the idea of doing multi room experience with linear story in “Alice in Wonderland” theme. However, the room is not big enough to afford more than three rooms. However, when Dale suggested a room with multi puzzles to solve a centralized puzzle, I still thought moment of “opening/unlocking” different room could enrich the experience. Therefore, as a group, we decided to have two rooms where guests need to solve three puzzles to open another room, where the final treasure could be found. And of course, tactile map will be there to educate the guests.

We are looking forward to presenting our 1/2s presentation next week as well as finalizing our budget and beginning to purchase materials. We want to be in a good place for the following week to build build build, so we can participate in the ETC playtest day on November 5th.

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.

This week, we had a few visits, a workshop, and one playtest (more here). Robyn Miller and Richard Vander Wende and a small team from EA were kind enough to stop by during the week and share some thoughts about our project, and we also had a very educational meeting with Jess Hammer who helped us reframe the way we were thinking about playtests and gathering data. Because of this meeting, we asked for emotional responses on the valence-arousal model after this week’s playtest and found that we seem to be on the right track! Heather Kelley also donated a few hours to have a smell workshop for our team. This workshop let us get creative with smells and try little games we could make with scent. As an opening to the workshop, she suggested we watch her talk here, which is excellent for those looking to learn more about smell and games. A huge thank you to all of our visitors and our wonderful playtesters – we had a very enlightening week!

From tech:

From  the final experience brainstorming session, several ideas involve potential usage of technology, such as using Echo as a robot character; using Kinect IR camera to track the position of guests; or using image processing to enable guests to “scan” items and get feedback. While all the playtests run in the following weeks, we will also be researching and testing with these technologies and hopefully be able to apply them in our final experience.

From design:

This week, we mainly worked on coming up with smell playtest. We came up with a detective story where testers need to use their sense of smell to identify certain objects with certain scent. We learned many things that could enhance the environment/resources for smell mechanic. But the bottom line was that smell mechanic to discover is found to be very engaging and fun, as long as finding objects give more feedbacks, reward, and meaning. Also semi-accidentally, we also learned that where we place certain things can dictate the navigation of people.

Next week, we will have another playtest but we will also be developing our design for the final experience.

From art:

During week 6 on the art side of the things, we spent a while working within the playtest room to measure and scale the room down. With scaling the room down, over the weekend we plan on making a 10th scale foam board version of the room so that we can have a bird’s eye view of the room when building the pieces of the final experience.

For the playtest on Friday we also spent some time in building the environment. We did not need to build a new specific piece for this playtest, but we needed a large number of objects and furniture for the space to make a compelling environment.

Next week we have many more industry visits as well as the opportunity to visit the Blind & Visual Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh and speak with one of their mobility experts, Miguel. We hope this will help with our goal of building an experience that really is for everyone, regardless of visual ability.

We will also have our final playtests before deciding on an experience that we will spend the rest of the semester building, because we hope to start on that the following week (just before 1/2s).