MIRROR MIRROR — PROJECT FEEDBACK
Group Project. Participants:
Jayanti Dave, Nupur Patny and Pooja Konde.
Exhibiting our work last class gave us the opportunity to speak to a number of our seniors and faculty, show them our work and get some great feedback. Even setting up was helpful because it allowed us to think about how to present our idea in the more simple and understandable way possible. We explained our concept to whoever came to listen and showed them the video. Explaining the concept repeatedly made us far more clear about what we were doing as well as some things we need to change or think about. It also helped to ask people what they interpreted from the video and see if it matched what we intended it to. We found that for the most part, people said that the intent of the video was pretty clear and that we had conveyed the basic concept that we were proposing. There were however some minor details like the location and setup that were a bit confusing, which we will make sure to work on for the next assignment.
We got a lot of great and specific feedback that we will do our best to incorporate ahead, one of the main ones being that we should try making the voice of the mirror a bit more human and less robotic. Since the intention is to help the person speaking in front of the mirror and to make them feel comfortable and confident, this makes a lot of sense as opposed to an unfamiliar, robotic tone. We will do this by changing the script to something more casual and conversational instead of speech-like.
One person also mentioned that bombarding the user with tips about how to improve their presentation might be overwhelming and make them conscious and nervous instead of confident. Instead of doing this, they suggested that we limit the number of tips per use to three, so that the student can work toward becoming a better presenter in small, manageable steps.
We got a lot of useful advice regarding the technology that we would use to achieve this. This is one aspect that we hadn’t really thought through yet, so it was really great to have people give us suggestions about how we could do it as we progress. A member of the faculty suggested that we identify a few parameters such as straightness of back, loudness, and eye contact, and detect them using different sensors and speakers. This would make the whole process a lot more doable as opposed trying to fit in a lot of different features and then not having any of them work. Someone else suggested that we play with the lights and use different colours to indicate different things. Yet another person suggested that we use the kind of facial recognition that Facebook uses too turn people’s faces into emojis. We found all of these idea very interesting and they will definitely help us bring our concept to life.
Another piece of critical feedback that we received was about the space that we chose to set up the interaction in. People suggested that perhaps the sickbay may not be the ideal place for something like this as it may disturb the people resting in the sickbay, as well as make the student presenting quite conscious. For this reason we are thinking about the different places that we could relocate it, and if there are some more private areas of N5 where it could be set up.
Finally another very important thing that was brought to our notice was about information and privacy. Someone asked us where the information that is collected by the machine would be stored and who would have access to it. This is important as not everyone would be comfortable with other people viewing their attempts at presentation, it may make them even more conscious than they were in the first place. One of the most important parts of the mirror is that in a sense it allows you to practice in front of a completely impartial audience. This feature would be gone if the person knew that some random stranger would be viewing it afterwards, and they wouldn’t be able to do their presentation in the way that we intended for them. We obviously wouldn’t want to secretly be able to view the data as we have seen that this isn’t ending well for many organizations around the world and is very unethical. If it is privacy that we are promising then we must honour that and do whatever it takes to make sure it is maintained. However since we didn’t really have a good idea of how we would tangibly be executing this project at the time, we just said that we don’t know yet, but we do our best to make sure that this is one of our main concerns when making the actual thing.
We got many more bits of advice such as creating a screen instead of mirror in order to simulate an audience, incorporating group presentation and respecting the unique presentation style that each person has instead of trying to advocate just one way as the correct one. We were so glad for this entire exhibition as it allowed us to think of a hundred new things to add and change about our concept that we would never have thought of ourselves. Considering the fact that it is students who will ultimately use this product, this is definitely one of the most important steps in making sure that we are doing things right, more important than how it looks or if it technically works. We will try to incorporate as much of the feedback we received into the final outcome as possible, and it would be interesting to then test it again and see how to response differs.
