Mockup and Walkaround
Walk-around is usually held a week earlier than the quarter. It’s a chance for the team to show our research and the plan for this project. Also, it’s the first time that we are going to meet all the faculty and receive their advice and feedback.
We prepare a 5 minute presentation consisting of two segments: project introduction and comparison for undecided solutions. Since our clients highly value immersion and extendability, AI Chatbot and 3D Animated Characters are preferred. However, they are also the hardest combo in our all possible solutions. We need faculty to share their expertises and experiences to comment on each solution. Most concerns would be out-of-scope for animating a virtual patient to real enough. Uncanny Valley theory is mentioned multiple times to point out that if we don’t have that much resource for tuning animation to good enough, our characters will be horrified and they would not have a chance to let students build a real connection with them. AI Chatbot is still a myth. According to our mockup demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YVpboxkVDc57A8pvsg312WvRuOuZI18G/view, the inevitable delay when the chatbot processes the response from speech input is neglect-able. We are not supposed to improve the accuracy and computational time for speech detection, so how to cover the gaps and manage the conversation requires us to discover it.
Gathering feedback from faculty, VR Video is recommended as a reasonable solution for semester-long projects based on previous ETC students’ works. We got several names of projects to study deeper how they compromised their challenges. Manual Control Conversation Tree is brought out by some professors as a suggestion of a parallel solution with AI Chatbot. Fake it until you make it. Last but not least, how to evaluate every student’s training performance is an unexplored area but necessary.
Thanks to the inputs from faculty members, now, we need to bring all of the advice and information back to the table with clients, and then decide which path we are going to continue further.