Production Process
Guest Testing

Venue: The Science Center
Date: 3rd December, 2002
Guest ages: 4 - 65 years old
Number of Guests: 45
Time: 1:00 pm - 5:15 pm


How engaging was the experience?
- We expected the experience to be compelling for around 2-3 minutes.
- Most participants stayed for 3-5 minutes, one couple of teenage girls stayed about 10 minutes. Even 5 minutes was a long time for a display at the science center.

Some of the questions we asked:
- What did you think?
- What was the ring doing?
- What did you like? Dislike?
- Did you understand how to switch screens?
- Have any suggestions?

What we learned:
- Different ages are interested in different scenes (teen guests liked more abstraction, ripples, blurring).
- Lights needs to be extremely particular, as discovered in our previous testing.
- The Navigation Arrows were not obvious enough.
- Some people didn't know what to do with the LEDs when they wanted to leave
.
- It wasn't clear that the LEDs were not required in some of the abstract scenes (wireframe ripples).

Suggestions:
- About half the guests were reluctant to give feedback because they were part of groups, and didn't "have time"
- "There should be more..."
- "We want to sky dive"
- Wanted to see the bubbles "do something"
- Stronger Lights (LEDs)
- Come back!

What worked:

- The setup and layout, with the exception of lighting.

- Spectacle (It was fun to watch your friends, it drew a crowd. We were in the most central location)
- Music (got people moving; they were less self-conscious)
- Putting people in the scenes

- Misc: participants from all ages are not intimidated by the screen. There was a very young child (probably 3 years old) who wasn't willing to participate, but after some encouragement from her mother, she walked in front of the camera and stayed for at least 2 minutes.

What didn't work:
- Some didn't understand what they were affecting, some said "nature."
- The arrows were too small, they didn't understand why they were there.
- Some guests didn't understand the interaction through LEDs (due to poor lighting conditions, they were not as responsive)
- The sun was shining on the opposite direction of the camera, and it was difficult to see the projections and detect the lights

- The first projector we had was not bright enough