Power of accumulation, ETC previous projects
There is no new/original idea. Usually, you can find alumni who have dealt with the same situation of viability and scope. Watching their trailers and reading their blogs do help us to explore and test our ideas. Project Kalpana and Project Full Stop are both inspiring works from ETC students in the past. Referring to their empathy-focus projects, we notice they both chose the 360 Video in VR to represent their story. These match the feedback we received from faculty last week. You can only feel empathy when you build a connection with the character.
Action is louder than words. We built a rapid prototype to prove the idea of 360 Video for interactive storytelling. It’s a game of paper, scissors, and stone. According to the player’s choice, it plays different clips to continue the story. As a golden spike, it helps us get used to the working process and brings a clear image for clients and advisors to imagine our final works.
Fortunately, our clients are open-minded to new solutions and trust in our judgment. Now, we are granted to change our path from 3D modeling to 360 video making!
Into the unknown
However, no one in the team is familiar with making films. To clarify the pipeline, we arranged a few meetings next week to consult some experts in filming and acting to learn more about the filming process. Before the half presentation, we decided to use ourselves as actors for prototyping as faster iterations.
The biggest concern is that making films is not fitting anyone’s expected direction of career path. However, as one of the ETC quotes, we are supposed to embrace the unknown and new.
Conversation tree
Unlike natural conversations, a conversation tree has no room for improvisation. We need to predict everything that might happen during the conversation in advance to set the branch to handle each situation and respond accordingly. Although the best intelligent assistant product in the market is still not as qualified as a real-talk person, how do we build an AI chatbot for a conversation where we want students to bridge their empathy? The answer might be the quote, “Fake it until you make it.” Manual control by the standby instructor or grader may also be our backup, but we need to fake an AI Chatbot to make people feel it is smart as a natural person. One of the possible approaches is developing well-comprehensive scripts, including as many situations and branches during the conversation.
[Insert the screenshot of the original scripts or reference video]
Therefore, this Wednesday, we met with our client, Naudia, to dive into the script and develop a conversation tree. Based on the reference video, we start the conversation from greeting to the purpose of visit, patient’s concerns, back story, and end by doctor’s instruction. For each response, we set three different branches, neutral, positive, and negative. According to the student’s reaction, the conversation will continue on one of those tracks. There are some overall evaluated standards like “nodding” or “eye contact”. We also discussed the possibility of designing some random distractions like a sudden phone call or a nurse’s interruption. The whole process was done by using post-it notes for clear visualization and easy modification.
[Insert the picture of our white-board-version-conversation tree]
From now, we have the backbone of our training experience.