Week 14

Hello and welcome to our weekly newsletter!

This week has been a week of reflection and planning. We went over all our soft feedback over the week. Here is what we learned from our soft:

• Timer
  • Timer in tutorial makes it harder
  • Guests need feedback for when the timer starts
• Guest identity
  • Players had an improved understanding of who they were and what their role was
• Teaching
  • Teaching interaction is hard to figure out
  • Teaching random names is fun
  • Communication and teaching with robot were interesting and fun
  • Confusing how to teach but fun once you figure it out
• Technical
  • Latency issues at times
  • Controller tracking failed many times
  • Only good at recognizing native accents
  • Pointing to objects from a side angle is hard, and it detects the wrong fruit or color
  • Good speech recognition
• Physical Interactions
  • Throwing food at customers is so fun and satisfying
  • Playing with objects in 0 Gravity is fun
• Sounds
  • Robot thinking sound is annoying
  • BGM is good, bit sometimes distracting
  • Robot sounds are fun
• UX
  • Did not know if you are supposed to hold on to the order form or not
  • Lack of instructions! (Maybe a tutorial mode)
  • Having to keep pointing at menu till the robot recognizes it is frustrating
  • First non-voice positive feedback was upon picking up the menu (Seems late)

We discussed the feedback we received at soft with our advisers and client. We agreed that:

• Pointing is clunky
  • Maybe you could pick up an object to use to point?
  • Or have the item just stay selected
  • If you want eye contact, maybe make it an interactive table
  • Once you press a button, that thing gets selected
• Objects that fade out could also work
  • Just want to make sure people don’t start throwing stuff around
  • Could have fruit holograms with colors underneath
• Could also add fruits into space to make the learning process more natural
• Think of a name for the experience

Here is our plan going forward:

• Video & archive
  • We will be shooting our team video and working on a rough cut for feedback from the instructors this week
  • We will also be archiving the work we have done so far
• Remove alien language
  • This is based on the feedback and our observations at soft.
  • The alien language on the menu form does not serve a greater purpose and only causes obstructions in the experience.
  • If we were to take out the alien language it does not cause a major issue, rather it helps reduce the unnecessary complexity and that is important to us.
  • We feel this way because, the guest is already in a new environment, interacting with an AI through a new interface they are not used to. Adding more layers of difficulty at this stage is not appropriate, we could do that at a later stage of the experience.
  • Also considering the time it takes to finish the experience its is more appropriate we do this.
• Try using fruits instead of pointing
  • As mentioned earlier, pointing is clunky
  • It does not feel natural when you teach, it could work if the guest has a stick they use to point to the UI blackboard
  • Now considering all the physical interactions in the experience, it is definitely helpful if we keep them consistent, the pointing is a one-time thing and does not add to the experience
  • We shall test this out more over this week and the next week for finals
• Make intro a bit more conversational
  • Might have robot just beep until player speaks
  • Introduce by name to showcase the voice interaction potential that players might miss otherwise 

Thanks for tuning in for our update, hang around if you would like to see how the next set of playtesting goes and what we learn.