This week, we began testing with a new sense – smell.

We held one playtest on Thursday and Friday for students and faculty. Most people (n=14) worked in pairs, but there was also an option to work alone (n=3).

In this playtest, guests were told they were Smell Master Detectives and were the last hope for a serial murder case. Two women were found dead and the primary suspect (whose house we were about to search) was about to be let go due to lack of evidence. The warrant was about to expire and would only cover a few categories of objects: a weapon used to kill each victim, an article of clothing from each victim, and a personal item from each victim. We gave them a goal of four items and, most importantly, handed them two cards we had scented with perfume to identify other objects in a living room with the same scents. We took them into the room blindfolded (to enhance their other senses), putting their hands on chairs at a table, and started a 10 minute timer.

The target items were a wooden rod and a screwdriver, a raincoat and a shirt, and a change purse and an umbrella.

What we were looking for:

-Ability to match perfumes

-Tendency to identify household objects (we expected they would not just smell things, but figure out what they were)

-Navigation behaviors

-Communication/social behaviors

What we observed:

-Smell is a very touchy sense. Some items smelled more strongly than others – the raincoat especially would not hold the perfume. The shirt and umbrella smelled slightly different from the perfume due to having other scents, so they were sometimes smelled and left behind. We will need to be very careful with smells we include in the final experience to avoid frustration and confusion.

-We can use props to move guests around the room. We guided them into the room and left them all at the same point of reference, almost all participants followed the same path through the room. They followed walls and pieces of furniture and avoided open spaces where there was nothing to hold onto.

-Guests can and will identify props and try to match them to the story. This means we will certainly need to find props for our final experience rather than build them – it’s the easiest way to have fidelity for touch.

-Guests may need permission to crawl. Some people are comfortable with it, but others still recognize that they are being watched and feel uncomfortable. We want guests to feel comfortable in this space, so we are working on ways for the environment to reinforce that.

-The story was memorable and the goals were clear, but guests need reminders of goals as well as feedback as they go through an experience, especially when playing alone. We are avoiding having a live actor for the final experience, but are thinking of using some AI to give audio reminders if guests ask for it.

-We asked guests after the experience to give valence-arousal feedback for the following moments: entering the room, exploring the room, and finding items. For the most part, guests reported feeling positive for the whole experience and higher arousal when they found items. Guests who have playtested with us before tended to feel more relaxed at the start, which could be because they are comfortable with us or because they are just more comfortable with new and nonvisual experiences.

Overall this was a very enlightening playtest, and we look forward to exploring scent in a new way next week.

This week, because of 1/4s, we had only one playtest.

Our goal:

-revisit multiplayer but in a divided way, with different goals for each player to participate

-test a puzzle mechanic where we give very little information

We built a wall out of paper inside the room and placed participants on either side of it (after warning them that it was fragile). Inside the room with them on both sides of the wall were various objects with cardboard tags on them, each with a three letter or number code, printed in the same way as our previous arctic algebraic equation test.

We told them that they would use all objects in the room including the translation wall and a code we would give them to find a new code to get out. The wall had numbers on one side and letters on the other, printed out in the same way as all the codes and stuck to the paper. The numbers and letters were lined up so that if one person touched, for example, the number 1, and the other touched their hand through the wall, the second person would realize that they had a corresponding letter on their side, and read it to find an H. That was the translation process we hoped people would figure out.

What they would ideally translate was the code that we handed the player on the number side of the wall on cardboard: 174. These numbers translated to HAT. That would then indicate which object’s code they would translate back through the wall to get the final code. The hat’s code was UMA, which translated to 957, which was the correct answer.

We found that this was, in fact, a very difficult task. This was the first time we had done a playtest where we wanted guests to make leaps in logic on their own, and it was not as carefully designed as it should have been. The wall itself caused some confusion as well, because the letters and numbers on it were harder to detect than they are on cardboard like we’d tested previously.

We will update this post soon with more findings, but our main takeaways here are:

-testing needs to be set up with more time and materials: the paper wall was a last minute decision and took away from what we were really trying to test

-design needs to be very mindful for people who cannot see and are not given a clear goal

Phone Elf Training

In this experience, guests were told they had turned into the little elves that transform human touch into actually dialing a phone. Because they were inside the phone, it was too dark to see, and they had to crawl around from button to button in order to hit the correct number pads.

Our goals were:

-to see how well people can locate items in space while blindfolded and what strategies they use

-to see how guests felt about crawling

Physical setup, which involved no tech at all:

With playtester:

The program we used to play sounds (by Annie):

We guided playtesters blindfolded to the center of the foam mats, at which point they were given instructions from a live actor (Dasol). Playtesters were instructed to crawl, except one tester who had a bandaged knee. They would then go through an exploration phase where they could try whatever numbers they wanted by hitting them with their hands. We would then push a button to cause the number of the key to be played over the speakers from all directions. This part took a little bit of work, but after a few playtesters we got the hang of it.

After they indicated they were done exploring, they would be given a series of 2 or 3 numbers to dial. When they got the whole sequence correct, we played a happy celebration sound. For the first few testers, we played a phone conversation from a movie, but that started to take too long.

As can be seen in the bottom picture (was added after the first was taken), we used an extra foam piece to make the top center piece (representing 8) feel different from the others. This piece was used for testers 1-8 and was removed for testers 9-13. We realized people didn’t really need it as they could also use the live actor’s voice to locate that key since he was standing by it.

After completing the tasks, which usually took about 10 minutes, we asked testers 4-13 to draw the dial pad as best they could.

Their drawings:

(5, 7, 8, and 11 have the correct sequence, and of those 8 and 11 have the most accurate shape)

Other observations:

Overall, our key observations were that

-most people used memorization of the sequence of numbers to find their way, and most used 8 as the central point (though the actor recommended that to some of them)

-when lost, most guests would either feel their way back to the 8 or use the sound of the actor’s voice to find it

-most guests did not mind crawling and found it quite fun. They also enjoyed that the story explained why they were supposed to crawl

-some guests found this exercise somewhat frustrating, but they did not have a negative experience overall and one such guest even said the experience should be harder though he struggled with it

This type of task is something we will need to test again with a wider playtester pool before implementing, because we saw many highly logical minds picking the most efficient strategy, and we doubt the general public would do the same thing at such a high rate. However, we are feeling pretty good about using large tactile cues on the floor to direct people, so this is something we may use in the final experience.

THE MEDUSA REACTOR

This was our first multiplayer playtest as well as the first with a dedicated pre-show. Our playtest signup email, seen above, was even themed, so story was a big part of this playtest.

Our goals:

-to explore the social aspect of being sightless with someone else who is sightless

-to introduce cooperation, something we are fairly certain will be a part of our final experience

When we introduced our guests to this experience, we as heads of the Medusa lab showed our newly hired lab techs a few slides about today’s responsibilities. The reactor would blind them if they looked at it, so we were going to blindfold them before they went into the lab. They were to find two pieces of a fuel rod, which are small and magnetic, and recombine them inside the reactor. They were shown an approximate drawing of the reactor. The fuel rods (magnets wrapped in painter’s tape) were hidden in sealed containers (plastic water bottles) on opposite sides of the room in a filing cabinet and a pelican case. Guests were led into the lab where ambient music meant to feel serious and a little stressful was being played, placed next to each other in the center of the room, and told they had 10 minutes to complete their task before the radiation would overcome them.

The reactor (by Dale):

During the task:

This playtest had very positive feedback in terms of emotion and enjoyment. Playtesters found the story memorable, though simple, and really enjoyed having another person with them. Unfortunately, this may be an ETC student trait, so we will need to test more, but they were also really good at working together right away to complete the task. There are many things we would need to work on to make this a polished experience and many lessons we could pull from the increasingly popular escape rooms.

Here are all of our notes, most of which are from post-test interviews:

We are thinking of iterating on this idea or at least coping its emotional arc of discomfort – discovery – achievement for our final experience. We have also realized through this test that it takes people 5+ minutes to find two objects and stick them together in an experience like this, so we will likely need a 20+ minute experience to tell the kind of story we want to tell. This is something we will work on in the coming weeks.

For our first playtest this week, on Wednesday, Dale created a set of touch based cardboard and vinyl cut board that people would have to try to read with only touch. Cardboard was used as a back and characters were cut out of a rough vinyl to make a drastic difference in texture.

The boards we handed to our guests were three simple algebraic equations that they were asked to read and solve while blindfolded. We increased the drama by creating an arctic mountaintop environment with wind sounds effects, 3 fans, the fact that it’s always freezing in that room no matter what we do, and a thick board as a bridge.

The setup:

Our goals were:

-reading numbers, letters, and symbols by touch: possible? time-consuming? how complex can we get?

-does the environment matter?

Results:

Guests were not only able to do this task with relative ease (of course – they’re ETCers!) but they were much faster than we had expected. After receiving many comments about the confusing font, we decided to alter the letters and swap out the a for an uppercase A for clarity. Some characters were still not easy to recognize but it was definitely better after we made those changes.

The environment had varied success, partially because we only had two speakers, both placed on the ground, and our fans were pretty low as well. But feedback makes us very hopeful about creating an immersive and real environment.

Our second playtest, on Friday, involved guests sticking their hands into boxes with water-saturated gummy worms, a fake fur puppet, and a cornstarch and water mixture. Each box contained a component or some other item that the guest had to find and carry with them to the end of the story. This test also let us dust off our improv acting skills.

The setup:

Our goal here was:

-does framing these unpleasant tasks as necessary or even pleasant remove the fear factor?

Results (right click and open for full size):

Guests blew us away by being so not fearful that more than one ate a gummy worm while still blindfolded. This may not work on people who are not our friends, so more testing is in order of course, but they were very trusting and our main problems stemmed from giving instructions that were either so direct that they did not remember a story or too confusing to find the items at first. In our final experience, we hope to not have a live host, so this is something we will need to work to address – the level of feedback and instruction for someone who is blindfolded. Another important lesson we learned today is that people who are blindfolded will touch everything and try to open it or pull it apart. Our final experience will need to be very polished to protect from this affecting people’s experience.