SMALLab Flare | Portfolio Website

RETURN

Timeline

12 Weeks (In progress)

Team

Yifan Shan

Tanvi Ganu

Tairan Gao

Valerie Li

My Role

User Research,

Interaction Design,

Web Design,
2D & 3D Art

Introduction:

We are SMALLab Flare, building and delivering 3 game prototypes based on SMALLab motion tracking platform and helping middle and high school students at Northgate School District with mental and behavioral health issues they face at school or life.

Delivery:

The prototypes we are delivering are respectively

1) an art intensive immersive experience;

2) an collaborative sports game;

3) a competitive color motion game.

Project Website:

https://projects.etc.cmu.edu/smallab-flare/

Our Client

For this project, our team is collaborating with Northgate School District students and Allegheny Health Network behavioral and mental health specialists, notably from the Chill Project – A mindfulness program for schools.

Platform

In this project, we are using a 3D mixed reality motion tracking platform called SMALLab that can make use of tablets and/or VR headsets in tandem with OptiTrack motion capture system.

The SMALLab plaform includes a foam mat and 3 motion capture ‘wands’ that can track a person’s movement on the mat.

Project Goal

The objective of building prototypes based on the SMALLab platform is to raise awareness and help middle and high school students with mental and behavioral health difficulties they confront through a variety of games and experiences.

Challenge

The domain of mental health and therapy was relatively new to most of our team. How should we address the problem and offer our help through building interesting games for the middle and high school students who we are also not familiar with, AKA our clients?

Technical Constrains

To better learn what and how we can make the most of the motion tracker technology platform, we examined and tested on the platform and discovered the advantages and limitations of the technology.

After booting up a few past projects that had been built on this platform, we quickly discovered a few game design constraits -

1) Low resolution of the projector on the mat

2) Shadows of the players on the mat

3) Only top view can be showed on the map

4) Maximum only 3 players can be playing together at the same time

Moving forward. We choose to develop based on the acknowledged circumstances and maximize everything.

Meeting with students

To better understand the students, their expectations and needs, we decided to visit Northgate School District to meet our players. We met with the high school students for a 45 minutes slot and middle school students for a 30 minutes slot.

We were aware that the topics we would bring up related to mental health might be heavy to discuss with people they are meeting for the first time, that is, us. We chose to start our meeting with a few icebreaker group activities.

During our group meeting/interviews, we asked students to write their mental health issues encounted during school or life on paper chits. This ensured students who might be uncomfortable to speak in a group got their thoughts and feelings through to us.

We also ask them to think of an word and a color they think of when they see certain words we show them. We designed this to gauge their first instinct regarding certain words, which can guide our art and design moving forward.

Main Findings

After the school visit, we took away with valuable highlights. One main highlights was to discover how interactive each group of students was - and how that would dictate the kind of experiences we make. Middle school students are surprisingly more open to discuss about their personal issues in the public while high school students preferred to write down their answers anonymously.

They all pointed out that stress and anxiety regarding academics, and being overwhelmed by school was the top issue they face and notice in their peers on a daily basis.

Prototype #1

Inspired by the Chill room initiative by the Chill team at Northgate school, this prototype would focus on free interaction and movement of the user on the SMALLab platform. The main aim of this prototype is to provide a calming environment for the students, and relief from the anxiety and stress they face on a daily basis.

Prototype 1

Inspiration

We sent over an activity for the students to do, to assist us in our art direction for the prototype we were building. We want to integrate their artwork into our experience in some way, to make it more personal to the students interacting with the project.

Our activity consisted of 3 prompts –

1. Describe an outdoor environment that calms you down.

2. Draw at least 3 elements of that environment. Use any and all colors you want!

3. Describe the kinds of music you would listen to to calm yourself down

The responses we got guided us into the kinds of environments we can build.

Interaction Design

Feature #1: Slow gradient into introducing elements

Based on feedback from the therapists, and to reinforce the concept of mindfulness, we made a decision to plan out a gradual flow of introduction of elements into the scene.

This was mainly aimed to not overwhelm the students with too many elements and interactions at once. This would also support the idea of focusing on the present and be able to observe the elements around you.

Storyboard

Feature #2: Planned interactions and their flow

We planned to add controlled interactions with the elements in the scene. While designing these interactions, we wanted to create an experience that is relatively new each time the student experiences it.

Development Process

For this prototype, we aimed to demonstrate visuals through different interactions to our client.

The purpose of this was to –

Test the limitations of the quality of resolution of our platform
Test the difficulty or ease of interacting with 3D objects in this 2D space
Get input from the client and experts on how they envision the students could utilize these interactions

Prototype #2

Since the first prototype is an art intensive immersive experience with no winning or specific goal. We decided to design our second prototype as a collaborative game that students can work together to finish the task.

After discussing with therapists, we were inspired by the idea of using different colors and animations to represent different emotions. And we were going to use the gamified prototype to teach students how to correctly deal with different emotions in life by recognizing the emotions and guiding emotions to the exit gate.

Prototype 2

Interaction Design

We worked on the game flow design of possible collaborative experiences the students would find exciting on the SMALLab technology.

As shown in the image, 3 players working together to use flexible ropes and ‘gather’ positive emotions to guide them out, while trying to avoid catching negative emotions in the group.

Some thoughts and concerns about on this were –

What happens when negative emotions get caught in the net?
- Can we do an activity if we catch the wrong emotion?
- Can we treat a negative emotion positively?

Quick Prototyping

Based on the game design flow and concerns we had in minds, we began development on the first version of our game prototype. And we quickly finished our first version to be ready for playtesting with students.

Purpose of playtesting:

Test the collaboration aspect of this game design
Test the ease of movement around the mat while interacting with the platform
Get insight from students based on difficulty level
Learn if students can recognize different emotions

Playtesting

On the playtest day at CMU ETC, we first playtested our prototype with 10 groups of people of all ages, 2 to 4 people in each group. We also conducted online survey and post-interview to learn more about players' experience and expectations.

Key Takeaways

We learned a lot of interesting facts and insights through observing, listening to and speaking with our guests during the playtesting sessions. The major findings are that even as designers who are completely familiar with our game prototypes, we are never able to accurately predict the players' next action and response.

For example, some older guests we invited are tend to be more conservative during playing the game. They chose to stand still on the lotus leave without moving a lot, despite the fact that the water projected on the mat is not real. On the contrary, young children who played our game were more likely to be active and unrestrained.

On the other hand, some players tend to consider this game as mindfulness and prefer to play alone and enjoy the moment by themselves, but some others regard this game as more exploratory and would prefer to enjoy it with others.

Project still in progress.

To read more recent updates, please visit:

https://projects.etc.cmu.edu/smallab-flare/blog/

The outcome