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.