Week 9

After a much too short spring break, we returned to a very busy week.

Between our last playtest before spring break and Monday, we implemented the following in our new build for the Children’s Museum Playtest Day:

• Sound effects
• Weather changing effects
• Walk animations
• Iconography
• Refined models
• Refined textures
• Refined background
• Closing umbrella animation
• Updated sad visual effects
• Updated pacing of interactions

These were all based upon feedback that we received from our last playtest, from the clients, and from our ever growing list of to-dos.

On Tuesday, we brought the new build to the Children’s Museum to integrate with the physical prop umbrella set-up for the first time. Weidi and Jinyi worked with Greg to integrate our build with the data from the umbrella prop. This is also the first time that we got to see what the physical tethered umbrella would look like! Please keep in mind that this set-up for playtest day is about half the width of the final installation. We hope that the final umbrella prop will actually be larger. In addition, there will ideally not be a huge shadow cast by the umbrella since we will be using forward projection.

On Wednesday, we returned back to the Children’s Museum for the much anticipated CMP Playtest Day. The Children’s Museum hosts an annual free day on Fred Roger’s Birthday (Happy Birthday Fred!). They use this time to test prototypes of future exhibits. We were set-up in the Text Rain space a room down from their other prototypes for the kindness exhibit.

We had over 200 children playtest our experience over the course of the day. Overall, children AND caregivers were excited about our experience. When they walked around the corner they would exclaim “this is so cool!” Smaller children would run right towards the umbrella or sometimes directly to pet the characters on the wall. In addition, we also found this was a great photo opportunity for caregivers. Many caregivers took videos/photos of their children playing with our experience.

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For this particular playtest, we wanted to simulate what the actual conditions would be in the final installation. We opened the area and did not provide instruction. We only observed from afar, and answered questions when caregivers asked us. We wanted to know:

• Do children understand the interactions? Do caregivers?
• Is the pacing of the experience appropriate?
• Do children share the umbrella? How do guests interact with one another?
• Do guests understand that they are practicing kindness?

When it came to understanding the interactions we found:

• If children stayed with the experience for longer they typically understood what to do or could figure it out easily, and would play for at least one or two cycles of the experience. They would also bring back their siblings/friends and instruct them on how to play the experiences.
• Caregivers often times guided play for younger children or worked together with them to help move the umbrella.
• Children who stayed for less than 10 seconds, just came and left, and didn’t understand what to do. This is typical behavior of what we observed at our exhibits.
• Sound was crucial to understanding and reinforcing behavior.

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When it came to the pacing of experience:

• Children were able to accomplish the interactions within the allotted time frame.
• Our faculty still thought the experience was a little too quick, and that there should be more pauses between interactions.
• We felt that there should be a shorter sun cycle (it was at 30 seconds), because sometimes a guest would enter the experience at the beginning of the sun cycle and not know what to do. 30 seconds is a lifetime for young children.

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When it came to sharing:

• We found that children actually shared! There were much fewer fights over the umbrella than I thought there would be (there were only a handful of incidences). Children either took turns using the umbrella or worked together. Most of the time, caregivers didn’t have to intervene.
• We added in an umbrella closing animation at the end of the interaction cycle, which was a natural exit point for children. They would play through once, and then once the umbrella closed, they would hand off the umbrella to someone else.
• Our thruput was very high. We had a new group of children coming in almost every few minutes to test out the experience.

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Do guests understand that they are practicing kindness?

• Honestly, I don’t know. We heard many caregivers say to their children “oh the doggie is sad, can you keep him dry?” or say “that’s so nice of you to keep the doggie dry!”
• For the most part, children understood that they were helping characters, which is probably the best that we can hope for since understanding kindness is not quantifiable.

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But sometimes guests just did this:

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(I whip my [umbrella] back and forth plays gently in the background.)

And luckily the prop did not break! (Thanks to the genius engineering by Greg.) Because the umbrella handle was slightly out of reach of some of the smaller children, and higher up, it did not promote that much hanging or swinging on the contraption.

However, since there was more give to the umbrella to prevent lateral pressure, sometimes guests couldn’t figure out that they had to push it harder to move the umbrella back and forth. We could either solve this by reducing the lateral give on the umbrella and decreasing friction on the track (which would then make the prop more vulnerable to breaking), or we could think of adding footsteps to the ground to guide guests to move the umbrella.

As well, the shadows caused by the umbrella and by the guests covered some of the characters. But in the final installation we should not have this problem.

Overall, we were really happy with how the playtest went and our clients were also pleased. Now that we’re done with this major milestone, we will have to begin preparing for the final prototype. Again, the final installation will be also twice in width of this current build, which will change the pacing of our experience. From now on, we will be building for a 22ft wide experience that we would like to demo on the ETC Playtest Day.

In the next two weeks we will put together a 22ft set-up at the ETC as well as updating our build.

For our next build we plan to have:

• updated animations: idle, sad, and happy states
• wind effects
• updated models/texturing
• new interactions to provide more depth to the experience
• simplified iconography
• updating pacing based upon 22ft long installation
• additional sound effects

Until then, be kind,
One Small Act