We are happy to report that the showcase went well! There were a lot of people who came out to see all the great SIAT projects, and we were lucky to be among them. While the team can agree that things could have gone more smoother, overall we were happy with our first public appearance with Sensorium. Some reflections we had:
- Everything that should work, won’t – the day before the showcase, we decided to bail on the motion tracking abilities of our head-mounted display as it wasn’t giving us the results we needed. While it was a good feature, it took people out of the immersion when it tweaked out and we decided to go with a more dependable joystick option for moving the point of view. While this seemed like a good idea at the time, even the joystick caused us problems in the demo and we had to restart the program whenever the joystick decided to not respond. Another lesson we learned is that it’s not a good idea to switch computers at the last minute – the sound-card of our second computer decided not to work and we lost the ability to show off our interactive sound at the showcase! It was rough but at the same time a good lesson learned for the next time
- People are fascinated with VR but also dont know what it is – a running theme was that people were interested in the idea of virtual reality and what we were doing, but also needed an explanation of what exactly we were doing. This took time and energy and we found ourselves having to commit a lot of effort to explaining our concept. Even if we were trying to be concise, it was difficult in the busy environment we were in and took away from the amount of hands we had on deck to operate the system
- It takes time then you think to get people in and out of the system – while we originally had the intention to get people in and out rapidly to maximize the amount of people who got to try out Sensorium, we had to account for the time it took to get people in the hammock, put the HMD and GSR on them, adjust the parameters of the GSR, get them familiar with the ability to look around and use the joystick, let them try it out for a considerable amount of time to understand the concept, restart the program if it wasn’t working, remove the gear, get them out of the hammock. We originally had the plan to print out their GSR readings to take home with them but we decided to bail on this too due to time constraints
Were looking forward to two more demos that will be happening in March, March 7th at the SFU Surrey Open House and March 9th at the FCAT Undegrad conference! Be sure to join us for more fun 🙂
Sensorium 