Playtest to Explore Workshop

Remember the Composition Box we created last week? This Monday the whole team participated in the Playtest to Explore Workshop at ETC, and presented the box to the instructors and other teams. We got plenty of insightful feedback regarding to relevant projects, ideal platforms, and potential problems.

 

Some of the feedback and questions.

 

We also tried out the Plex Cards, to brainstorm ideas with stakeholders. We picked the Exploration card as our central word, and generated a mind map from it. Playtesting with Plex Cards is a great way to bring everyone on board and set a base tone to the experience.

 

Mind map generated from a Plex Card.

Client Meeting

On Thursday we had an informative meeting with professor Joshua Bard and Francesca Torello, the points of contact of our client, the School of Architecture of CMU.

The team were provided comprehensive data and scanned models of two well-known plaster casts, the Niniveh Pavement and the Tower of the Winds. These are great assets to start with. More material of the other three items will come in soon. By the end of the semester, we plan to feature at least five casts in the application, providing a unique interactive experience to the guests in the Hall.

      

                    Professor Joshua Bard                                     Professor Francesca Torello

 

 

 

Challenges

The team is very excited about the challenges we are going to face.

Technical challenges: The existing digital assistant application in the museum are mostly based on iOS system, while our team is provided with Google Tango devices. We will have to make a choice between iPad and Tango. Regardless of the platform, position tracking in the physical and AR environment will also need a lot of research. Current possible solutions include pattern recognition, internal map learning, and physical marker scanning.

Content display: Row scanning, high resolution textures, stories, dealing documents, and videos, the content we are working with requires presentative ways of displaying and integration.

Explore new interface and interactions. AR is a relatively new concept to most guests. The team is challenged to design an intuitive interface and interactions for the storified or gamified experience.

Traditional tours and physical constraints: As happening within an museum space, the experience has to work well with existing traditional tours, under many physical constraints. For example, putting AR markers onto the walls or floor would be less prefered by the museum, as well as heavy traffic caused by the viewers with Tango devices.

Next week, we are going to focus on primary research and branding materials.