This was the final week of project work for Music in Motion. We were pushing to complete the final touches on our project this week, and there were quite a few. We had a bit of a repeat of our Soft’s experience while prepping for the ETC open house. We spent several sleepless nights ironing out our experiences finale, the progression system and the look of the world.
When we reached open house we received some terrific feedback from our naive guests. We were very happy to hear that they did in fact feel a part of the music creation process. Many guest stopped by to look in on our light show, and the other guests that were performing in our experience. We were also shocked when we heard our experience described back to us as “performative”, “dance-like”, and an “installation piece”.
People were intrigued by the procedural nature of the audio and had lots of questions for us about the nature of ambisonic audio and how we had designed the world. We did encounter a number of problems with the experience that had not yet been identified through our previous playtests. We saw quite a few people struggle with depth perception in the VR space. Several people could not identify at all where our line tracing were placed in space. These people were mostly individuals who needed glasses. However, it could also relate to the way that the device measures eye distance.
An known issue we encounter a few times, was that people still don’t feel comfortable walking in VR. As much as we tried to guide our guests to move, there were some individuals who never became accustomed to this.
And finally, there is the fact that our guests stand ankle deep in the sea within our experience. We had one playtester who indicated this felt a bit strange to them, and another who found it absolutely terrifying. While we looked into ways to add to the world so that the guest could feel safely rooted on land, the design changes were too tough for a short turn around. Instead we decided that we would warn our guests about what the experience contained so they could chose to opt out.
Aside from these problems, most of our guests really enjoyed engaging with the musical world. We were pleased to see some people get into the performative nature of the experience and saw some dance like movements. Overall we were happy with the reception our project received at the ETC open house. The project is now wrapping up, and our conclusions on our work and what we have created can be found in our post mortem.