StarSound in Action

The StarSound installation is finished for presentation and was set up in Blackrock Castle Observatory for three days so people could interact with it. All the visitors gave very positive feedback about the experience and really seemed to enjoy the installation.

Despite a few minor issue that will be addressed during the next days, no major problems came up and the installation works just fine. The dates for the final presentation are the 6th and the 7th of June.

First User Studies

First user studies did take place during the Easter break in my personal apartment. Three individuals where separately put in front of the floor projection and asked to interact with it, without giving any hint or advice. The results from all three users where fairly similar.

Here are the two most common issues that occurred, that definitely have to be addressed: 

How to move the hand
The fact, that the installation is controlled with the hand was pretty clear from the very beginning (though this might be, because the Microsoft Kinect was standing clearly visible for the test users). However, all the users had problems to figure out, in what way the cursor on the floor moved to the hand. As the cursor is supposed to be directly underneath the hand (so only X and Z of the user's hand coordinates are affecting the cursor movement), all of them also where raising the hand on the Y axis. Since the cursor still moved slightly, this seemed to be fairly confusing at the beginning and it took some time for all the users, to actually figure out how to properly move the cursor with their hands.


How to select
It was not complete clear, how to actually select a star (or that you can actually select a star). Selecting a certain place happened more or less by accident the first time, when simply not moving the hand for whatsoever reason. Obviously, the sudden zooming in was fairly surprising for the users and during the flight to the star and back, during which the Kinect is not reading the hand, they weren't sure if they could still interact with it and tried to do so.

All these issues can hopefully be addressed with better sound design and a better cursor. The prototype the users where tested on, was still fairly basic, as the cursor was only a static red dot and there was hardly any sound design. Sound design that implies if the Kinect is in use or not and a certain sound design for the cursor itself, that makes clear, the hovering still over a certain position actually means selecting it is extremely important for the project. An animated and visually more significant cursor would also largely support the overall interaction. Both if those things have to be implemented before the next user studies, that will hopefully take place in two weeks in the dark room of the B Block.

User Studies Preparation

Besides all the urging technical issues, user studies are extremely important, since a perfect technical implementation is worthless, when the interaction and the whole installation in general isn't user friendly. The first user studies will take place in my personal room in my apartment. The installation space will be improvized with a floor projection on the carpet and the Microsoft Kinect in front of it.

The sound will come from the laptop speakers, which should be sufficent at this point, as the main focus of this study is to test the interaction and not the immersion of the installation. The space has already been set up and works just fine for this purpose. The quality of the projection however is fairly bad, which is due to the irregular structure of the carpet. As shown in the video below, the interaction itself works just fine though, so this created space should be sufficient to gain first data of users interacting with the piece for the first time.

After the evaluation of this study will be complete, a second larger user study 1-2 weeks after this one is planned in the studio room of the CIT Multimedia Department in the B Block.