Lights, Camera, InterAction
By: Aziz Ghadiali
Tags: Theater, User Research, User Experience Design, Emerging Technology, Hci

Understanding what could be

Using the collective research insights we had gathered up to this point, we began the process of understanding what kind of solution could address our high priority user needs.

After discussing a plethora of potential solutions we decided that we wanted to explore how emerging technologies could be used to augment the theater-going experience in an effective way. We decided to go the route of virtual reality since it presented the most opportunities for recreating the best parts of the in-person experience at home.

Experience Prototyping

After choosing to adopt a VR solution, we wanted to bring our idea in front of our users to see if the solution would:

Satisfy people’s needs for in-person interactions Be a comfortable method for people to interact with others Be easy for people to comprehend and use

Building the prototype

Due to our time, monetary, and technical constraints, we created a low-fidelity prototype by designing various VR environments in Figma that were three A4 pages in width. We then printed out the environments and created cardboard models to simulate our “VR headset” that participants would use.

Testing

We tested three different environments with users. In the first, the users have the option to either interact with their friends to discuss and share their thoughts about the show. In the second, they are able to interact with other audience members and meet people who have similar interests or thoughts about the performance. In the final environment, users have the option to interact with members of the cast and ask questions.

Home Screen

Interacting with your friends

Interacting with other audience members

Interacting with cast members

We made the conscious decision to set have our experience available to users during the intermission rather than making the entire end to end experience virtual as we thought that it would be overwhelming to users and may become uncomfortable wearing a VR headset for an extended period of time.

Key insights

“Having spacial awareness of the theater environment and the people around you while engaging with others definitely beats the stacked video frames on zoom”

People had varying levels of comfort when it came to interacting with other audience members in the current experience People wanted to use this experience beyond just the intermission People wanted a higher level of interaction with that actors that really takes advantage of the of the affordances of VR People were worried about the gap in immersiveness of the experience based on the specific VR device they were using (Google Cardboard vs. Oculus).

Iterating

Based on our user feedback we made a few improvements to our experience:

We added more structure to the “meet the audience” by auto-assigning users into small groups to participate in a fun trivia game related the the show to give help them initiate the interaction with others We change the “meet the cast” experience to include more intimate interactions beyond asking questions such as receiving digital autographs that you could have mailed to you on a variety of memorabilia.

We also decided to focus on framing our solution as a service provided by the theater so that theater-goers would be able to receive a consistently high quality experience. We determined that the increased engagement with the theater would outweigh the cost of obtaining and maintaining these devices.

Presenting our findings

Future work

The next steps for this project include conducting additional user tests to refine our service as we move into higher fidelity versions. In addition, we would want to work with KST to figure out a plan for an initial beta run where we could actually build a simple virtual experience and test it with real audience members to better understand people’s perception of the service, hidden costs, further improvements that would need to be made to the experience, and how to effectively deploy this at a larger scale that supports KST’s long term business goals.