Test date : October 26, 2011
Location : MFA DT Lab, Parsons The New School for Design
Objective
Observe the level of attention, exploration and engagement with a sound installation.
Observe behavior of participants when confronted to a sound interface with no visual feedback.
Description
A computer sound interface is placed in a highly transited zone in an private open space. The interface uses a camera to sense movement and proximity and outputs sonic feedback based on those parameters. The camera and speakers were placed in a zone where people usually walk by (near a hallway), with the intention to see if the interface made them stop.
When users walk by the interface, depending on how much they move, a sound becomes louder, if the user freezes, the sound stops. A second control is provided depending on the proximity with the camera: as the user gets closer to the camera, a second sound (with different timbre and frequency) gets louder. Consequently, if the user walks away from the camera, the sound will decrease in loudness.
Scale
One to four
Constraints
No constraints or directions given.
Questions
- Does the interface makes them stop to explore/play with it?
- What are the identifiable user’s behaviors when confronted to the interface?
- How long is the engagement?
- Do the users seem to understand the parameters?
Initial observations
In the context of a quick-prototyping time frame, three possible situations could be observed:
- Users don’t notice the presence of the interface.
- Users notice the presence of the interface but don’t interact with it.
- Users get engaged in the experience, mainly taking an exploratory approach.
It was interesting to see that sometimes the interface remained unnoticed, even though the volume of the sound output was set relatively high, the acoustic contamination of the chosen space made it sometimes imperceptible. In other cases, potential users that walked by and noticed the interface didn’t take their time to explore it, they either found it not interesting enough to take some time with it, or they really had no time.
In the cases of the users that got engaged, even though the experience didn’t lasted for too long, they seemed to be curious about the interface and the gestural controls.
For this prototype, sounds with an ambient aesthetic were chosen, this produced a constant presence of the sound even if there was absolutely no movement or presence. The attack time was low, so the rhythmic patterns that could be generated were not extremely straightforward. Having two different but harmonic sounds controlled by different parameters allowed two stages of engagement, the first one is to discover that presence and movement produces a sound. The second stage emerges only after the user spent a moment understanding the first one, leading to explore how proximity affects the sonic output. This observation suggests that the aesthetics of sound play an important role in the engagement and exploration.