Day One @ Rave On Air
Written June 4, 2008 and published in Degree Stuff | 0 Comments
User testing with large groups of people was very interesting today.
It was a ‘live’ environment so there was the ‘Virtual Earthquake’ going off in the background and the ‘Red Carpet’ crowd cheering loudly, all of which meant it was difficult for people to understand Shoutbox as their shapes were quickly overridden with the ambient sound pollution.
When the room was quiet though and a small group of people came in, it was easy to see them enjoying Shoutbox. Once the simple explanation was given they tried it out for themselves and created shapes. Some even had competitions to see who could create the largest shape or the fastest shape.
Even when there were no groups in the room you could see members of the Interaction course playing with it. Tom was playing a piece of wood like he would his bongos to create a series of shapes that were in time and also played back the same noise. He said “it would be great for VJs”.
The only problem with it is one that was expected and that is running it from my laptop. We have perfectly good G5 quad core Macs in iLab but we can’t use those, instead we were stuck with some old G4s that had no microphone input, the MaxMSP trial had expired on some of them and some had an administrator password that nobody in the entire faculty knew.
For the delegates tomorrow the flash .swf file will need resetting after every group so that it is a smooth as possible. Even though the shapes are deleted after a new one is created, where there is a very loud consistent noise (like from either of the other two sound based installations) the collision detection struggles on the relatively poor performance of my laptop.
Here are some pictures of today. Click to view the whole set in Flickr.
