Leave it at the Door

Credits

The creators of this project are: Kelli Kuramoto and Emily Liu. Kelli is a junior studying Information Systems & Human Computer Interaction. Emily is also a junior, but she is studying Design.

Description

Our exhibit disguises itself within the welcome area of the haunted house, introducing the entire exhibit to all those who enter. When they first come in, they are greeted with a quick introduction and asked to check in; entering information such as their name, andrewid, and major. They are also nudged to leave feedback for specific exhibits they enjoyed, using a QR code posted throughout the house. What the visitors don’t know is that this data is used to create a summary of their time at the Haunted [Smart] House, presented in the form of a dark blue envelope with a thermal printed receipt. On the receipt, there is a link that will take them to a digital ‘guest book’ which retells the story of everyone who has entered the exhibit.

We want our visitors to think about how technology is all around us, listening, watching, what else could it be doing? If our Haunted [Smart] Home is embedded with technology, when does the house really end? Is it when you exit its walls? If you think so, we urge you to think about if your digital presence ends just because you’ve exited out of your browser?

We think the spookiest thing about technology is how it never seems to leave you … or does it leave with you?

Process

We went through a long brainstorming process before we were able to narrow down our idea, form, and experience. Emily started out with this initial idea of a magical coat rack that when you placed your coat on it, by the time you picked it up to leave there was a note of something lost or remembered in your pocket. This catapulted us into the idea of creating an experience that didn’t end when the user left the physical space.

After speaking with some professors who volunteered to give us some “first iteration” critique, we quickly realized that many people might not have coats in the beginning of May. So, we refined our coat rack to a bag drop, because we figured many of the users would be students coming from class. We knew that our output would be a “letter” that was generated via thermal printer; Emily had experience working with that piece of technology from the previous unit so we felt comfortable incorporating it into our exhibit. We bounced ideas back and forth about the input form, from written to text, and voice to text, and finally ended with a digital form to easily capture the information.

Then we were tasked with how to capture the users actions during their time at the exhibit and convert that information into a form that we could track and place into ChatGPT. We had a wide range of ideas from having a person following the user, to qr code cans, RFID, all the way to computer vision tracking. Initially we tried to use RFID tags and ask visitors to download an RFID tracker app at the start of the exhibit and whenever they went up to a new exhibit they would “tap” the sensors so we could track their location. However, when we tested this on our own phones, we found that the iPhones were not great with picking up the RFID signal. We also realized that we were placing a lot of the energy and effort on the visitors and that there was a good chance that they were not going to tap into all of the exhibits or even download the app at all. Another idea we had was to use QR codes with forms placed at all the exhibits, and we would ask the users to scan and fill out the form of what exhibit they were at when they neutered. This way we could track the time of when they “checked in” and allow us to gather information such as length of duration, exhibit location, name and any additional comments the visitor wanted to leave. However, after more conversations surrounding feasibility, Emily and I realized that the timing of the exhibit would not allow us to parse this data fast enough to print the receipt by the time they left the exhibit.

We went back to the drawing board to rethink our input of user information. We decided that location based information was slightly too ambitious for every single person who entered the Haunted House. As a result, we compromised with location based data that visitors gave up voluntarily. We hide this aspect of data collection in flyers that we posted throughout the Haunted House that would allow visitors to give feedback for specific exhibits. They would enter their name, exhibit they were at, and any comments they would leave. We then would take this information and place it in a “digital guest book” that would be accessed from a link on the receipt that they received at the end of the exhibit. This idea would still allow our core experience of, data collection spookiness and the idea that technology never really leaves us, to pervade.

Lastly, since we were stationed at the entrance and the exit, this allowed us full control over the start and end of their experience. We decided to completely ditch the idea of “bag drop” and instead pose as a welcome area where visitors were given a brief introduction to the Haunted [Smart] Home. In the couple minutes that we had each person’s attention: we asked them to sign in (gather data used in the receipt), nudged them to fill out our feedback survey form (to gather data used in the digital guest book), and highlighted our exhibit at the end where they could pick up their receipts (to gain access to the link for the digital guest book). Disguising as a welcome area allowed us to enhance the overall user experience because they didn't even know we were an exhibit ourselves.

Despite not fully incorporating all of the intended features, including individual tracking and personalized experience summaries, into our final exhibit, we are pleased to have successfully maintained the fundamental experience of "technology never leaves us" throughout the entire project.

Form Iteration — Photos documenting our process of iterating the note/envelope design

Critical Reflection

Overall, we felt our project was successful. Some of our classmates didn't even know that our 'check in' was part of the exhibit. The people who picked up their summaries of the exhibit inside the envelopes really enjoyed the receipt and thought the guest book was a nice touch! We weren't able to get the envelopes to every person who walked through the exhibit which would definitely be a goal for next time. Another area we could improve on is nudging visitors to give more feedback to add to the guest book. In the end we had to use the data that they inputed during check in to populate the guest book because only about 5% of visitors left comments. Regardless, during the exhibit itself, we were able to disguise ourselves as the check in area quite well and send the data to the thermal printer to be printed efficiently. Neither of us had put on an exhibit quite like this one, but we were proud of our end product!

Roadmap

Ideally, our interaction would incorporate location based data to be used in the output of the receipt that the visitors receive at the end of the exhibit. For example, if someone 'scanned' into If walls could speak at 11:45 and then 'scanned' in to InControl at 11:54 you would know that they were at If walls could speak for 9 minutes. Then on their receipt we would print: "Wow, you were in corridor for almost 10 minutes, what were you doing, vacuuming?". This would increase the spooky feeling that technology is always watching you and collecting data.

With regards to implementation there would be no additional technology needed. We would just need to create a QR code to scan into each individual exhibit that collected data into one spreadsheet. Ideally, we would write a python program to parse this data and send this information to the other computer. The second computer would be hooked up to an Arduino and Thermal Printer with ChatGPT capabilities in order to generate random, but individualized receipt summaries. I think the biggest challenge that we would face with this implementation would be gathering the data accurately and parsing it correctly in order to send to ChatGPT.