Today we presented our final exhibition to a group of Xerox employees at the Student Life Center on campus! We spent last night to early morning hours setting up our space. Chairs and desks were moved, computers set up, food accessories were bought and the projector became a very welcome asset to our experience. All that was needed was to finalize our interactive demo and have Chai cookies, Chai muffins, Chai and Coffee ready for our exhibitions:
Pics from setup:
The next morning, there were a few hang ups, mostly concerning embedding a video chat .flv into flash. When it ran both the video chat and the face recognition code, Flash crashed. We finally came to a decision to completely forget about the video and focus on personally guiding our audience at their station. Other problems that arose dealt with the facial recognition itself. It worked like a charm for our first group – maybe a little too well. Log out time was much too short, making it so when a user looked away from merely seconds they would be logged out. Taking a cue from that, Andrew lengthened the log out window to ten seconds. However, we believe that the success of facial recognition login was more dependent on how busy the face.com servers were being hit. There was a theory that as lunch hours started, the number of people using facebook/etc rose, lowering the priority of our facial recognition.
Collateral: Posters (Interface and Physical Space), handouts and stickers were printed to give out to the Xerox audience, explaining both the concept of the pxlB cafe and providing a guideline to the interface. The stickers were used to help brand various objects, as well as ourselves. It also was a fantastic take away! Who can resist awesome pxlB die-cut stickers?
Membership Photo: Past the collateral was the host/hostess station – a laptop set up with a webcam, where you were directed to take five photos: one looking straight ahead, one with your face tilted up, one with your face tilted down, one with a smile, and a final photo that would be loaded onto your profile. The user’s name was also submitted here.
After being entered into the system, users were guided to our Concept Video. The video provided context for our solution: rise of telecommuting, thinning out of proprietary offices and thus physical office space, lowering of trust, etc. It then described our solution and how it addressed social networking, collaboration, and file sharing. It also had a quick guide to our interface. It can be viewed below:
After this introduction we had the panorama of a 3D model of the physical space of the cafe. Alicia explained the various aspects of the cafe – the modular seating, the sync-able touchscreen interfaces, the privacy curtains, the beehive coffee bar, and the public job ticker. Users could pan left and right through this 360 degree render. It was also projected on the screen over our workstation setup.
The workstation setup: 3 computers were loaded up with our flash file, which all required facial recognition to be logged into. The users were given prompts on the bottom via the helper bee. However, it became apparent after the first group that it was best for one of the pxlb team to guide and point out the various features of the interface. The linear story prompted the user to open up the connect widget and view who was in the cafe. If other users were logged in at the two stations, they could see them online and could chat with them. After that, the user could bid on a job in the job ticker, and then open up the project widget and download a file. Every profile was clickable, and every user profile featured their custom photo taken at the host/hostess station and their name as it was input into the system.
After that, we had a table full of chai cookies, chai muffins, coffee with creamer, sugar, green and black tea with honey, and mints. They represented the types of goodies a member could redeem their cafe points for.
Overall, we are quite happy with the results. There are definitely changes to be made before showcasing it at imagineRIT, mostly dealing with finalizing the user interface design and making actions such as messaging each other more intuitive and friendly. However, our concept was strong and we believe we were able to communicate it with excitement and a fair amount of knowledge to those that visited us. If you were there or even if you weren’t and want to ask questions – please feel free to ask here!
Now to conquer Thursday at Xerox!
