Halves presentations are done. We presented our own work and watched our peers present theirs.

We have received a lot of feedback from our client, the larger Tepper Quad Media Walls Committee, and the ETC faculty. We’ve been looking it over, deciding which feedback is relevant or not and why, figuring out where we need to change course moving forward, and what we need to present better in the future.

Arim and Vivienne attended today’s ground breaking for the new Tepper Quad. Afterwards, they joined some prospective students for an info session and campus tour. This was a recommendation we received from Don Carter of the Media Walls Committee. We gained a lot of insight into the existing welcome experience, the kiosks and informational flyers they have, the questions the parents and students ask, and how guests react to the experience as a whole. This will greatly inform our refinement and creation of additional guest “personas” for our documentation and design decisions.

We’ve also been assembling some models to populate our welcome center. After today’s events, we should be able to create more that are similar to prospective students.

Created with Mixamo’s Fuse Software

Our halves presentation is on Monday.

Our virtual reality demo is well underway, with the initial building model fully integrated and the beginnings of multiple viewpoints, time of day changes, and more in the works.

Extensive user experience scenarios and “personas” have been documented.

Concept art for our current hardware design is being finished.

We’ve also worked out a weekly schedule all the way through to the end of the semester. It all feels quite clear and doable. We’re feeling good about where we are now.

A lot of presentation work will be done this weekend, then we’ll have the rest of next week to finally take a step back, watch other presentations, and manage a bit of a breather with a (relatively) lighter sprint.

We may spend a fun team bonding day making humanoid models in our likenesses to more naturally populate our virtual building.

Over the weekend, we attended Cèilidh. We got to talk to a lot of visitors, newer student families, and alumni.

Arim and Vivienne have been hard at work analyzing the survey responses we received and organizing them in a way that will inform our decisions about the experience we are creating.

Brandon and Brian, meanwhile, have been looking into existing architectural virtual reality demos as well as lighting and rendering. Many of these experiences use the Unreal Engine because of the level of visual realism it can provide. Our team, however, is more experienced in Unity, so we are looking into the more visually successful demos as a guide.

Laura has been working away at modeling the building space itself. It should be ready to integrate into our demos next week.

This month marks our road to Halves.

The pace is picking up. We now have a dedicated Oculus DK2 for our team. Our Unity project is set up in version control, and digital 3D modeling of the building space is underway. We should have the beginnings of our virtual reality demo soon.

On Thursday, we met the rest of the committee for the new Tepper building project. They were glad to get to meet us, and had a generally positive reception of our current concept work. The committee seemed particularly impressed with the lengths we are going to to understand the needs of our target demographic(s).

Speaking of which, we will also be having a booth at this weekend’s Cèilidh homecoming event at CMU. We will be talking to visitors and giving them surveys we’ve created. Hopefully we’ll gain some insight into the perspectives of alumni and visitors.

We have also received our promotional print materials. We will be bringing some of them with us.

This week, we have been refining our concept and preparing for Quarters Walkarounds.
Our Quarters presentation was today.

We received a lot of useful feedback and suggestions from our faculty.
Several people pointed out that we need to put a lot of thought into the content. The example content we show and the experience of the guests will be a big part of supporting why this installation should exist. We also need to think a lot more about what our target audience actually wants and needs to keep the content relevant.
Others questioned where all of the equipment and servers for running these installations is going to be. We will need to look into what plans exist for a tech closet.
They also gave recommendations of existing projects to look at and people to get in touch with.

Some of the most encouraging feedback were reactions to our idea of a virtual reality demo and our day-to-night transformation. VR is on the rise and will likely become a big player in architectural firms and other such groups who need to present material like ours; this is a great opportunity to push that. The day/night transformation also tells a powerful story. The experience can be very guest oriented and informative during the day, while turning into a playful student oriented experience after dark.

We’ve made arrangements with Lisa to gain access to prospective students and possibly a booth at the upcoming Homecoming event so that we can further our user research. Survey questions are in the works.
We also received a CAD model of the Welcome Center space. It will take some time to organize the components and convert it into something more usable, but it will mean a lot less guesswork than modeling the entire space from scratch.