This week, when planning our playtest, we had the following goals in mind:

1. we want to continue testing mechanisms for the sense of smell;
2. we would like to try using a tactile map and see if it helps people to have a mental picture of the room and navigate easier;
3. we want to see if we can get people to reach for things above them, which is quite a challenge when they can’t see.

So targeting these goals we planned our Friday playtest: the Birdhome Delivery Service.

In this playtest, the setup of the room is very simple. We first picked 3 kinds of fruits – tomato, orange and apple – because they have more noticeable and different smell than other fruits.  Then we put these fruits in plastic bags, and hang them on the ceiling of the room using fishing lines. The fruits are hanged at different heights: one around the height of one’s chest, one very close to the ground and one above one’s head. Then in the corner of the room, we put a little desk with 3 baskets and a tactile map on it. The baskets contain little pieces of the fruits so that they all have distinguish smells of the fruits, and the map shows where the fruits are hanged in the room (marked by the little dots). And the position of the desk, which is where the players start, is also marked at the corner of the tactile map using a different material.

The guest’s mission is to use the map to find these 3 fruits, bring them back to the table and put them in the right baskets by using their sense of smell to match them.

In order to lead people into thinking that they need to reach out to get what they want, we did some level designing in this playtest. The fruit which is nearest to the guests’ start point is hanged at the chest level so that the guests can find it easily. As we discovered in previous playtests, people like to follow the walls when navigation in the space. So we predict that their next target would be the one on the far end of the room and we hang the fruit their at the ground level, which they can also find easily but is at a different height as the 1st fruit. Then the last fruit is hanged above the guests’ head level as the most difficult one to find, but we expect them to start thinking that the fruits are at different levels.

We ended up doing 9 groups of playtests, three of which are multiplayer. We proved lots of our assumptions as well as learned some new things.

1. The tactile map is definitely working pretty well in giving people a quite accurate idea about what the space “looks” like. Some people even started wandering around the room without touching the walls because they were so sure about where were they going.
2. Even though some people were able to navigate without physically touching the walls, they still follow the wall’s directions and their path through the room is the same as we expected.
3. People who smoke might have a hard time using their sense of smell.
4. If told the objects are fruits, people might want to eat them.
5. People like the tactile map and they want it as well as the room to be more complex.
6. Not everyone got the idea that the final fruit might be above them; even if they had, people won’t stretch their arms high enough to reach the fruit especially if they are already short.
7. The smell of fruits can be quite consistent through the day and most people can smell the difference of different fruits as well as identify what they are.
8. Guests would like to have feedback when they did something right or wrong, in this case, matching the fruit and the basket.
9. The moment of realizing something is above average height and actually finding it through reaching is super satisfying.

A more detailed version of the feedback can be seen through this link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F421ZeC5wRg7fkiAMtysn6YCT_VV3QJ9BT-_FWw1598/edit?usp=sharing

In conclusion of this playtest, we think that a tactile map is definitely something we want to apply in our final experience; we may want to have people reach for things; for smells we probably want to use things that have natural, strong smells such as tomatoes, but we don’t really want puzzles that can only be solved using smell since some people will not be able to do it.