(HCI+ISE)
72
Resource:
Social Immersive Media: Pursuing best practices for multi-user interactive camera/ projector exhibits. Snibbe, S. and H. Raffle. Proceedings of Association of Computer Machinery Computer-Human Interface 2009 (ACM CHI 2009). Download at: www.snibbe.com/pubs/
Immersed in discussion
What we came up with is that there can be individually immersive experiences in which you are honed into a space and are able to focus in that way, and then there are shared immersive experiences around tables. You can shift between the two, so you can shift your focus from one space to the other. The successful immersive experience affords that kind of movement, which leads to the third definition, this sort of interactive hybrid in which we are interacting with each other, with multiple people, but can also move back to that individual space. Scott Snibbe wrote a great paper about socially immersive experiences for an HCI conference in 2009, and a lot of ideas in that paper guided us in our discussion about what creates a socially immersive experience. One of those qualities is that as more people enter the experience it should get better and not worse. That is a good test as to whether your exhibit is actually being immersive or not. Also, there is something that designers shy away from for some reason and I think it has a lot to do with design education. That is, a multisensory experience is inherently more immersive. When I design visual experiences (and I am more trained as a visual designer), I am usually the one who has to remind the client that you can use sound as well. And using sound is quite cheap to produce and it is remarkably effective. Yet I am not really trained in sound design and sound is subjective, so it is not an easy thing to do. The point is that we
don’t create experiences that are multisensory enough.
Problems and Constraints There was a feeling amongst many in the group that we should be doing more prototyping and we should be more iterative in our prototyping. We also talked about different types of prototyping. You could be very literal in your prototyping, using your client’s actual content, or you could be more metaphorical where you are trying to create an adjunct to the experience that gives you a sense of what it’s like without using the content. It is also not prototyping for prototyping’s sake, but prototyping to get it out in the real world. “Release more often” was the catchphrase, which is also about being prepared to make more mistakes. Two phrases here require additional explanation by a group member: An Explanation of Terms
Ben Wilson Manager, Interactive Media, Museum of Science
“Fault Tolerant Group Dynamics” In talking about the potential for shared social experiences, there was concern that the dynamics can be broken by people who don’t know the rules. They aren’t particularly well-versed in whatever is going on if they haven’t accepted the social contract or the rule set implied by whatever the shared experience is going to be. You would use adaptive systems to be able to modify the experience and correct for that. Some of the technologies that we have been talking about throughout this conference are going to help us build some of that fault tolerance.