Week 8 exercise

Email

1. Add to contact

The add to contact function of E-mail can be replaced by the physical action of putting a person’s card on a receiver connected to your computer, like how SKAL works. This will require that the person you want to add have their information stored on a chip which is built in their card.

2. Send E-mail to a certain person

Likewise, if you put the card of someone who is already in your contact, two boxes will pop up. One is the detail of the person, the other is the compose e-mail box with the receiver already filled in with the person’s e-mail address.

3. Move a mail to Junk

A rubbish-bin-like controller can be collected to the computer, when you are reading an e-mail and find out it is a junk mail, you can step on the paddle of the controller to open the bin, and the e-mail will be moved to your junk mail.

4. Different folders in E-mail

We can also have a couple of physical object which we can store information and can be recognized by the receiver, they represents different folder of your e-mail, like inbox, sent mail, spam etc. When you put one of those object on the receiver, you computer will immediately open up your e-mail and jump to the corresponding folder.

5. Add to important

There is a rubber ball that you can punch while reading an e-mail, when you punch the ball, the current e-mail will be added with an “important” tag. The ball can also measure how hard you punch it, the harder you punch it, the e-mail will have a higher ranking in the important list.

Super Mario

1. Jump Control 1

A sensor can be mounted on the player’s foot, it is wirelessly connected to the computer so it can recognize it when you jump. This is pretty much like the Xbox Kinect, the game character will jump when the player actually jumps.

2. Jump control 2

Alternatively, player can punch a ball to control the jumping of the game character. The sensor in the ball measures how hard the player punch the ball, and the character will jump to a corresponding height. The harder the player punch the ball, the higher the character jumps.

3. Touch the cubes

In order to get reward, the Mario brothers have to jump and touch the cubes with their head. A physical control of this can replace the traditional keyboard or controller. A soft cube with sensor can be hanged on the celling, the player wear a hat with sensors that will recognize if the hat touches the cube. So the player has to jump high enough to touch the cube with their hat, which will allow the game character to get reward.

4. Move the character

Player can wear a sensor on each arm, which can tell when they raise their arm. In order to get the game character to move right, the player has to raise their arm and vice versa.

5. Growing bigger

When the character gets a mushroom and grows bigger, the player will get a larger hat, it will make it easier for the player to touch the cube. But the hat is also heavier, thus make the player less agile.

Twitter.

1. Follow someone

Every body can have a twitter card of themselves that they can exchange with new friends. When you get a new card, you just need to scan it with your phone or computer camera in order to follow the new friend.

2. Notification

When people mention you in one of their tweets, you printer will print a small card for you. You put the card to a reader, which is a device connected to your computer, you will see the tweet show up on the screen no matter what you are doing on the computer at that moment. And you can always store those memories in a box.

3. Share favorite tweets

When you see something very interesting on twitter, you can print out a twitter card which have those interesting tweets stored on it. You share the card with your friends, and they can see those tweets by scanning the card with their phone or computer camera.

4. Upload tweets

When you want to upload a tweet, instead of taking out your phone and typing, you just need to squeeze a ball, which is a mini microphone connected to your phone, and you talk to it. The ball is not very easy to squeeze, so you need to try very hard in order to upload a longer tweet.

5. @ Someone

If you want @ someone in your twitter, you usually need to type their username in. Now with the twitter card, you can just scan their card in while typing your tweet, and they will be @ automatically.

Interactive Prototype 1 - feedback of testing

Trough testing my interactive prototype 1 in the contact session, I received a great amount of interesting and valuable feedbacks, they would contribute a lot in my refining the idea and the game.

Someone suggested that he could not confirm if he clicked on a wire until he moved the mouse off the wire, and it will make it better if the cursor can change to a scissors shape when they hover it on a wire. Thus I decided not to show the cut instance of the wire when they hover the cursor on a wire, the cursor will turn to be a pair of scissors instead.

Another feedback I got is that it is not very clear what kind of questions they can ask before cutting the wire. To solve this problem, I will add a list to the game interface which contains the question you can ask.

I also received a couple of comments saying the game is too easy, and I should make the wire panel 4x4 or add some more bomb and disarm wire. I think it can because of I did not add the time competing feature to this prototype, which made them ignoring the way to win this game, which is disarm the bomb faster, not simply disarm it. Disarm the bomb very fast require good logic in asking questions and choosing which wire to cut, so I think it is not too easy. But I will do another test after I add the time competing feature, if people still think it is too easy, I will try to fix that.

Another thing I noticed was that only very few people made use of the sheet I provided to mark the location, and I was advised that it is pretty easy to remember so it is not necessary to mark on it. Thus I will not provide this sheet any more unless I decide to make the game harder.

Week 7 - Video prototype questionnaire review

After review my questions in the questionnaire of the video prototype, I found the following questions to be quantitative:

1.Do you think the game is fun?    ☐Yes    ☐No

2.Do you like the wire-cutting thing?   ☐Yes    ☐No

3.Do you think the game is very simple?   ☐Yes    ☐No

4.Do you think the game system is a bit complicated?   ☐Yes    ☐No

And the following questions to be qualitative:

5.Do you have any questions about the game? (Please specify)

6.Do you have any suggestion for refining the game? (Please specify)

Now I have realized that the question “do you think the game is fun?” is too general and broad which make it hard to get specific and valuable feedback. Thus, in order to test if the game entertains the audiences, I decided to rephrase the question to “do you think there are enough challenge for you in the game?” and “do you think the wire cutting process is a fresh concept?”.

I also realized that some of my questions are a bit leading, for instance “Do you think the game is very simple”. Those questions have a closed end and sounds pretty absolute make it hard for the users to choose and for us to get good feedback. To rephrase the question above, I would say “How do you find the gaming process, especially the wire cutting process?”.

I also found that I seemed to have too much quantitative questions in the questionnaire that may not help me too much on refining the concept and developing of the Hurt Locker, I will try to establish some more qualitative questions for the next prototype questionnaire. Even for the quantitative questions, I will try to develop more options for them which would allow users to give a more accurate answer.

My CRC cards

Main
Setup the wires

Wire
Mouse over Mouse roll out Mouse click of blank wires	main

disarm
Mouse over Mouse roll out Mouse click of disarm wires	main

detonate
Mouse over Mouse roll out Mouse click of the bomb wire	main