04/03 Body-storming
It was an eye opening exercise for us.
Our team had multiple concepts and used body storming, a research method to enact our storyboards and bring our concepts to life. As we had gotten very close to our concepts, this exercise helped us step back and critically look at our ideas together as a team. The whole point of the exercise was to identify the loop holes and understand the value of MR in a language and cultural learning space.
We made a couple of prototypes that became our MR devices and this helped us understand the space for new interactions. Enacting and embodying our personas and scenarios helped us have richer discussions about the technology we were addressing. It also helped us focus and narrow down our concepts further.
We tried a couple scenarios of different use cases where we were matched up with a language partner and visited different environments. Played with a few features: captions, conversation prompts, vocabulary help, pronunciation.
We had discussions around the technologies that would play a role in our solution and listed them down. We also discussed in detail about the concept of Mixed Reality and what it means to our team. We agreed on Mixed Reality being “Shared Reality” for our solution and how language learners can benefit greatly from a Mixed Reality solution that helps them be immersed in the native language and culture.
We critically thought about the intrinsic motivations for learners and their native partners. Learners would be motivated to use this solution as it enables them to experience another culture and language without physically traveling to that place. From the body storming session emerged a few questions which were:
Q) How do we move within realities and from reality to reality? How do different users interact with each other, and how do they interact with third parties?
Q) How could we help people moving into a new environment and a new culture be respectful of that community and become integrated into it? From our speed dating exercises we had learned that relationships play a vital role in this process and that interpersonal connections are where people learn best.
The key takeaways from our body storming session were:
- The concept that we narrowed down relies heavily on the relationship between learner and local host. We learned that visual cues could become a barrier to building a relationship and that its learning benefits weren’t worth that cost.
- Decided to create two separate modes: an immersive interactive mode and an individual practice mode, to make use of helpful features while eliminating the barrier they might create between people.
