Alina Goldman

Creating Immersive Performance Experiences

Hello everyone. My name is Alina Goldman, and I’m a first year PhD student in the iSchool

What did you do during school assemblies?

Lets start off by considering your experience with school assemblies. Does anybody remember what they used to do? [discussion]

Lets start off by thinking about your experience with school assemblies

Lets start off by considering your experience with school assemblies

Assemblies had many different purposes, e.g. culture and education. Regardless of the subject, the experience educators hoped to achieve should be important enough to replace class.

Lets start off by thinking about your experience with school assemblies

Yet, as all of you suggested, this is what actually happened during assemblies. Rather than creating an engaging environment, students use assemblies to talk to or complete homework.

In fact, assemblies so bad that kids like this one would rather watch the grass grow than attend. Poorly designed experiences are not limited to assemblies, but is quite common. When the presentation doesn’t immerse users, its content gets lost.

Creating Immersive Performance Experiences

This brownbag overviews the psychology of immersive experience, flow, and describes how technology may be used to improve the design of experiences

About Me

I started my career as an opera singer and received a bachelor’s degree in voice performance

I came to UMD to study business because music was a business, but end up study consumer psychology and behavior

I ended up receiving my masters in human-computer interaction because I wanted to make things that had measurable impact

My work has been a triangulation of auditory, visual and interaction experiences

I’ll begin by introducing a book that has profoundly influenced the way I think about experience. FLOW introduces the idea that an optimal state of experience exists.

(mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee)

If you don’t have a chance to read the book, Csikszentmihalyi discusses his work in a TED talk

After interviewing world-renowned researchers, athletes, and musiciains about their work, Csikszentmihalyi found that they all described optimal moments of extreme focus

This state is achieved when a task is challenging and a person has a high skill level. If a task is easy and skill is high, a person tends to be bored, and when the task is difficult and skill is low, they tend to be anxious.

Should you design “flow” experiences in

your work?

Benefits of Flow

Experience becomes highly

pleasurable

Task yields optimal performance

increased confidence

Increased self-esteem

Increased happinessYes! The wonderful thing about being “in the zone” is that it not only makes tasks pleasurable, but yields optimal performance, increases, confidence, self-esteem and happiness.

Using Technology to Design Immersive

Performances

First, we’ll discuss how performance technology contributes to flow, and discuss how it may be improved.

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Ineffecti

ve!

I recently attended an opera that allowed audience members to interact with the performance through their phones. While it was an interesting idea, the audience spent most of the show looking at their phones and not the performance.

Design Problems

• How can we make engage audience members and give them appropriate background?

• How do we create an immersive experience for a diverse audience?

This experience have lead to several questions: how do me make performance relatable, and what foundation to people to need to understand the performance?

• How can technology customize performance?

• What interactions are appropriate for diverse groups?

• How can technology be incorporated with minimal distraction?

How do you design

immersive experience?

Immersive Design

Immersive designers often contextualize work in a time-based narrative and story space to achieve flow. Rather than creating use cases, which focus on low level steps, designers synthesize an emotional story that accompanies interaction

Different design approaches have been used to create narrative. For instance, Storycubes is a tactile tool for thinking through design by exploring different relationships and narratives

Similarly, common craft creates dynamic storyboarding that considers how interaction may affect narrative

Another technique, design improv, uses improvisation acting techniques to generate and understand user experiences and narratives

Design for Multiple Senses

In addition to creating meaningful story, I’ve observed 2 design trends that have the power to improve performance experience. The first is to creates multi-sensory or synesthetic experience. The reason for this is that our brains process limited amounts of information, and are overloaded when there is too much information. However, each of our senses processes information differently, so through different sensory channels we can process more information than through one channel. Now what we think of as our basic senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) are credited to Aristotle. In fact, we have approximately 20 different senses, that include pressure, pain and thermoception (hot/cold). By designing technology that faciliatates multisensory information, we could create an experience that allows people to process richer information will less effort.

For instance, the Oscar Mayer Bacon app integrates smell into an alarm clock to create a richer experience

Facilitate active Participation

The second method to create rich experience is through active partication. Traditional performance either treats audience members as passive, however when audiences participate they have a more meaningful experience. Examples – call and response in church, Boalian theater, improv compedy.

The rain room is an example of multi-sensory design – while there is no specific narrative, the sensory dimension ties into past experience and the audience participation makes the experience playful and unique

Even more engaging is the show Sleep No More – it creates a pinnacle of multisensory narrative and active participation, and unique experience

HCI Challenges (that could benefit

from Immersive Design)

Could the performance interaction principles described in this talk benefit other HCI disciplines?

VR+

CitizenScientis

t Training

?

Online education?