The week of 1/4s has past! We had the opportunity to meet with the ETC faculty and share our progress so far and get feedback about our direction. At the end of the week, we held one playtest which you can read about on the playtest section of this site.

Our feedback at 1/4s was mixed and we will be sitting down as a team on Monday to go over it all. Many faculty members were supportive and excited about our progress, but some were confused about the work we’ve done so far. We hope that we will better explain the purpose of our playtests at 1/2s and have a clearer explanation of the guest experience we want to build this semester.

From tech:

Not many tech things happened this week. However, during quarter walkarounds, several faculty members mentioned some tech we could use to make the experience better such as using IR camera and computer vision to track guests’ movement in the room, directional speakers that can only be heard in certain positions and so on. We also found a set of “sound jars” that were used before and now taken down in the wood shop, and they might become something useful for us as well. Overall, there are many new things we could think about and decide whether or not we want to experiment with them.

From design:

This week I worked on our quarter presentation and coming up with a playtest for Friday. Through quarter feedback from the faculty, I felt the need for us to really find a clear vision and implement our future tests based on it. Our last playtest got us excited about the “multi-player” experience. For this Friday, we as a group came with an idea to test the puzzle element of it. We divided the dark room into two sections, and two players had to give each other the necessary information to solve the puzzle. Overall, we found out that any information we give to the people need to have meaning and if we want the guests to do certain things, it should absolutely be clear, especially when guests are blind folded. Now we need to come up with clearer goals for our final experience. During the next two weeks of testing with sense of smell, we’ll be talking about what we actually want to achieve.

From art:

For art and construction this week, we had less work than normal. The main piece that we had to work on this week was to set up the environment for the Friday playtest, as we did not have a playtest on Wednesday. Most of the time that we had left over for the week was put into brainstorming for the playtest Friday, and 1/4s presentations and meetings.

Next week we will go over all of our feedback, work on a more specific set of goals for the final experience, and begin playtesting with smell in our experience after a smell workshop from Heather.

Week 4 was a long and exciting week for team Lights Out. In addition to our usual 2 playtests (more on those here), we had some industry and faculty visits and even found time to do an escape room as a team (for inspiration, of course).

We had the opportunity to chat with visitors from Blizzard and Riot about our project in the middle of this week. Many of them were excited by the concept of something nonvisual and found our playtests so far interesting, but largely recommended that we find more of a direction. Also this week, we got a chance to meet with both Jesse and Dave. Jesse gave similar feedback – about finding an emotional target and being able to convey that at 1/4s next week. Dave, who we met later in the week, was one of the first to hear about our emotional target after we had a chance to discuss it. He also got to playtest our first multiplayer prototype. He gave us a lot of feedback about improving that prototype, saying that it felt like an escape-the-room experience but very low fidelity. This type of experience seems like the direction that we want to continue with future prototypes.

From art:

This week, we finished off all of our branding materials. This includes the team photo, which you can check out in the media page of our site, that the team had fun with coming up with and was rather funny to watch come together in Photoshop. For the other branding materials, we chose the final description for the half sheet, and took all of the feedback from the workshop and tried to meet more of the concerns that people had with the materials.

We also had a little bit to actually build this week for the playtest that occurred Friday. For that playtest we needed to create a “reactor” that 2 people had to stick their hands into, without 1 person being able to reach both ends.

From tech:

This week we did some research and google-oriented programming and we found a way to make Unity play 5.1 sounds. From now on we should be able to play directional sound cues at desired times as controlled by Unity. Other than that, we also got some demo codes from the research lab of Tesla Touch. So, if we come up with any good ideas about how to use the technology in our experience, we will be able to do that.

Since playing surround sound with Unity can be a tricky question, just to share with whoever might be reading, the solution can be found in the following link:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1067337/playing-pre-mixed-51-audio-1.html

From design:

This week I worked on coming up with different ideas for navigation and spatial awareness. First, people could learn to be aware of where things are based on a definite point they can come back to and redirect to different places. The test could’ve been better prepared. But generally, once people were able to go back to the reference point, they found their way.

The other test (medusa nuclear reactor) was to test how cooperating with another partner would be compared to a single player. Above all the findings, we found out that multiplayer is much more appreciated than we expected. That was a very clear indication for us to pursue a multiplayer experience.

We also came up with a list of emotions that we want to achieve through our experience. Our target has a very similar feeling to that of an escape room. However, more and different kinds of experiences will be tested before 1/2s.

Next week we will finish off September by meeting with all faculty for 1/4s and having two more playtests, looking at music and emotion as well as having more multiplayer experiences.

Lights Out is starting to playtest so often that we will post detailed information about them in the playtest section of this site. This will also make our weekly updates less intimidatingly long 🙂

We focused on touch this week rather than sound, because we did not yet have all the equipment we wanted for sound testing, but sound still found its way into our tests this week in a significant way. Also, this week Tina Blaine was at the ETC and was generous enough to stop by our project room! See the previous newsletter (a special edition which also talks about Ruth Comley’s equally generous visit last week) for more about her visit.

Design:

This week, I worked on brainstorming for touch playtests. Along with other ideas from the team, we came up with 2 tests that we wanted to try. One was to test if we can generate a certain environment (arctic place) using fans and arctic wind ambient sounds and to test if people can recognize simple letters/numbers through touching the surface. We learned few things that so that we can manipulate environment in better ways and people could also read through touching their hands.

The second test was to test if people could still have a pleasant experience while putting one’s hands into a box to identify certain things. We used a simple story (to save a man from a dungeon) and pleasant, epic music. Many players had a positive reaction putting their hands into the box. It was really encouraging to find out that people could have a pleasant experience while touching unknown objects as long as the appropriate mood and mission is given. So it’s exciting.

Also I’ll be working on researching and learning how 5.1 surround sound could be designed and created.

Tech:

This week we finally set up the 5.1 stereo sound system and ran a few test sounds on it. The system is working pretty well – the only problem is that it’s quite difficult to find 5.1 audios on the Internet. Related to that, in the near future, we want to try to learn how to make surround sounds ourselves. We also want to start looking at how to build 5.1 sounds with Unity next week.

We also have our night vision camera ready now thanks to the help of the great Steve and John, the masters of all the IT problems. We should be able to finally use them to record our playtests in the dark beginning next week.

Art:

We showed off the first draft of our team branding to a group of art faculty that walked around checking all of the teams branding materials on Monday. The response was very positive with a few critiques and some suggestions. Those critiques were on the poster’s logo font, that being the leading letters of the team name. They also were worried about color blending at the printers on the poster, but also thought that if it did blend it would work to our advantage. One of the suggestions was to make the poster logo blend into the background. For the over logo, and the half sheets, they were very happy. During the week we tried to implement the suggestion of the poster image, but we were unable to get the design to work. We also wrapped up the second draft of the branding materials that will be reviewed on Monday in the branding workshop.

Next week we will be continuing with touch testing. It’s looking like a busy week but we are excited to explore areas like balance, spatial awareness and wayfinding, and multiplayer cooperation.

Last week and this week, we had the opportunity to get input from two fabulous members of the ETC community – Ruth Comley and Tina Blaine (Bean).

Ruth shared her expertise in working with haunted houses. She told us all about how people act when they are in the dark, beginning with “they lose their cool.” She’s seen every kind of reaction from people while they went through haunted houses, including parents using children as shields and people sitting down and refusing to move on, which are good reactions for us to be aware of even if we are trying very hard not to elicit a fear response during our experience. With an experience like this, where people are without vision, Ruth emphasized safety and the necessity of observation. If people are uncomfortable, they may not give honest feedback after they are returned to comfort. These are very important for us to keep in mind moving forward. We also hope to try to pull from the many examples of multisensory experiences she shared with us, but again, we are aiming not to scare people…so we will need to choose carefully.

Bean is a musical soul, so we sought her wisdom in the world of sound and hearing. She suggested that we speak to people who are visually impaired to see how they use sound in their everyday lives, especially to move around. Maybe we could ask them if there was anything people who are visually impaired wish existed to make life easier, and try to make it real, though Bean realized this is probably a goal far larger than this one project. She told us about some of her past work including an audience participation project that involved sending a ball (which was really a big button) through the audience at a concert so they could make sounds play as it was hit. This sounds like something we could replicate in a way in our experience! Exploring opposites like hot and cold and isolating senses more than simply being visionless were other suggestions of places to explore during this semester.

Thank you both again for meeting with us and giving us all this wonderful information! We hope to use it to make something great.

This week was a short week because of Labor Day and the Fundamentals Adventure Module (which half the team attended)! Despite this, we got started with two sound-related playtests as well as making progress on branding and our semester plan. We tested people’s ability to identify objects by sound and their ability to aim a projectile at a target using only sound.

The identification test was carried out on Wednesday. The objects we used to test were:

We also used an empty Pepsi can, an electric toothbrush as well as a box of cereal.

We put all the objects behind a cover board so that when playtesters walk in the room, they wouldn’t accidentally see them. Then we let them sit in front of the objects on a chair, facing away. After everything was settled, we produced different sounds by hitting objects with our hands or a metal chopstick or other simple operations.

The layout of the experiment:

In all we did 10 playtests with our classmates – the results are put into a form below. We use a √ mark whenever they directly get the material of the object right. If they made any more guesses on what exactly the object is or they were incorrect, we wrote down what they actually said.

The form above covers all details on the playtest. [click and view image to view at full size.] To sum it up, most people did a really good job at identifying general materials such as cardboard, wood, glass and metal. For objects with more unusual materials, such as the super thick glass lid and the two types of foams, the success rate of people recognizing them is lower. All the playtesters succeeded in recognizing the toothbrush as some sort of motor and the cereal as some kind of food. Interestingly, different people have different guesses on what exact kind of food it was. Our theory is that they were just hungry for whatever they guessed.

We also have two other findings: firstly, people tend to relate the sound to objects they are familiar with rather than materials. One playtester mentioned that he was imagining times in his life he had heard sounds like the one we made, so that was why he made specific guesses. Second, when many of them heard the sound of the Pepsi can, they said it was a really large object. We’re not sure whether that’s because of the sound itself or just its loud volume.

On Thursday and Friday, with Alex and Sol gone, Dale and Annie worked on branding for the project so that we can finish the complete branding early next week as well as the second playtest on Friday.

With the branding, we have a few design concepts that we are waiting to discuss once we have a chance to meet as a whole team. Alex, before she left, was able to find the printer that we normally use to contact them to see if we can do a custom print that is not typical of the ETC project half-sheets. You can see some of the first mockups Dale has created below.

For the playtest on Friday, we spent the morning assembling the materials that we gathered Thursday. We created a slingshot and used eraser toppers to shoot a target.

In the first part of the test, the target was stationary and rotated around the room between shots, and in the second half the target moved back and forth across the rooms walls. We had our playtesters practice both of these with the lights on, then repeated with the lights off. After a while we discovered that people’s eyes were adjusting to the light, so we had them close their eyes as well.

With the results of this playtest it seems that people are able to make shots with their eyes closed/with the lights out pretty well. Many seemed to almost have an easier time hitting the moving target with their eyes closed. We may post our detailed results later on.

As a team, we decided in the beginning of the week that it might be too aimless to just come up with experiment after experiment without a motivation or overarching theme. Therefore, we came up with multiple story ideas and wanted to make prototypes that would be necessary to make a complete and relatively high quality experience. However, our advisors suggested that coming up with a story for the semester at this point of our project may be too risky, since we don’t know what’s even possible. Therefore, we will be choosing a very simple theme (for example a ninja training his non-vision senses) just so that we can come up with prototypes in motivated and themed ways. And hopefully, at the half of the semester, we would be able to have a good scope of what we can do well. We believe this will enable us to make a prototype that is polished and complete.

Other things that happened this week: Our project website is initially set up. It’s no longer a pure white webpage with blog posts on it. It’s now a pure black webpage with blog posts on it.

Join us next week for our next two sound-related tests! We will be looking at narration and voice or pitch matching as possible mechanics.

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!