But the most important thing is, we went to Steelers vs Giant game on Sunday, Dec. 4th!! Spoiler Alert, Steelers won!

For us, this game is more like an intense field research rather than an entertainment event. We tested our application, made a lot of tweaks and took a lot of video footage. After all the hard work, we’re satisfied with what we have found during the game.

After all the craziness, we backed to our project room (the next day, of course) and started documenting everything as well as making some further improvements.

This is a great semester and we’re happy with what we come out now!

Also we make sound for this app. Though during a real football game it is not possible to hear any sound from the application. But we still keep then for the purpose of demonstration. Also this week we tried our application on a new footage–a football video game footage. We also prepared for the festival, since our client will come during that time.

This is a busy week for us, and we’re looking forward for the final!

Right now the character looks like this:

Of course, with this character introduced, some UI and flows of the experience will be updated. The team is working on putting everything together, please stay tuned!

Built on our initial thought, we came up with detailed design like this:

At the beginning, every user choose what they want to get, it can be as small a prize as a coupon, a hotdog set, or as big as a souvenir like a hoodie. The point is–user choose what they want. Then during the match, before every play, the moderator will trigger the event, and right after the play started, the moderator will give an answer. Each correct prediction will give solid progress towards the final reward, so that the frustration level can be reduced to a minimal level.

The playtest day gave us a lot of feedback on the new design. Though for people who does not watch football at all, this app is less exciting, however, as long as people have some knowledge of football, they immediately engaged into the app. We downloaded a video of a 2007 Steelers vs. Jaguar game, which is the only one approved for download from NFL, then time-stamped every single play, and determine every answer. Then we put the file in the program, so that when the video reaches certain time, the event will be triggered–we were replacing the moderator with machine in this case.

In this playtest, there are three levels of reward: snickers, coke and nachos. And in the end of each playtest session, we  actually give those prizes to the playtesters, which not only help them understand the app better, but also brought tons of fun.

Then during this week, we decided to add more features to the new design, start with a graphic upgrade, and allowing people compete with each other more with a leader board. We also started to think about what tools the moderator should have, though we’re assuming he/she will receive the exact same tools as the TV broadcasters.

This meeting is very inspiring for us. Based on what he told us about the audience, we decided to add more contents that facing older audience.

The new game design is about predicting the next move by both teams on the field. Since people like to do that all the time, and they’ll find the moment that they can “beat the coach”– what the users predicted turned out to be better than what the coach chose to do. Also this type of game naturally enhances social interaction among audience. Of course we kept the real-world reward part. Users are still able to get juicy coupons if they can predict correctly!

We did a great job in describing what we’re doing, and we followed our faculty mentors’ advice, put a lot of image into the presentation so that our research become more convincing. This is crucial for a research project like us.

And after half presentation, we got the chance to meet an expert in the business side of sports, who knows a lot about our target audience. After the meeting we not only have more things to talk about in our user group analyze(a.k.a the former “research paper”), but also we are able to make more detailed changes to our prototype.

This week we also started our new design of UI. Candice gave a lot of options to us to choose from, and we started to think carefully about portrait & landscape view.

On Friday we had project shadowing and talked to first year students.

First things first, we set the glossary:

“Game”: the football game, what happens in real life;

“Player”: the football player, in real life;

“App / Experience”: the app we’re building;

“User”: anyone who play/use this app

We developed further on the game design, especially the theme. Instead of beating a dragon using magic, it makes more sense to have a football-themed gameplay. So now the “enemy” become a giant football player that tries to get a touchdown, and everyone else in the stadium will cooperate to stop them. The way they use to stop the touchdown is through directly pushing, which is available for everyone, or throw items they collected during the football game.

Also we decided to put the entire experience in the first half, because what we observed from the football game between Pitt and GT indicated that after the first half, people will pay more attention to the game, or simply want to go home.

For the technical part, we made good progress on image processing, and now what left is just math problems. With the Vuforia prototype, we made a simple game that shows our idea, we also made art assets and put them in the game.

Our half presentation is next week, and we’re ready to do that!

We’ re going to approach the solution through two ways: building our own image processing algorithm and using pattern reorganization provided by the SDK.

Here is a demo of our prototype using AR SDK for Unity:

The other way is hard at the beginning, but we’re expect a better performance in the end. The AR SDK do have its limit: the frame rate start to drop when we try to put more stuff into that. Image processing is taking input from camera and try to recognize the field in real time.

Next week is half, so we’ll also be preparing half presentation this week.

Right now the game design is simply collect magic spells from the field, and use that to defeat a big monster. We already have a prototype, and will showcase that next week.

The biggest thing happening this week for us is we went to a football game. It was Pitt vs Georgia Tech(spoil alert, Pitt won in the last 7 seconds). And we got the chance to experience many of the things we have read or heard about. When we were still on the high way, we were already able to see a huge blob of people tailgating, then after a nightmare of finding parking place, we finally got the change of join them:

It was a fresh experience for most of us. We spent most time observing audience rather than focus on the game, and got a lot of useful impressions of how people behave during a game. Also we are surprised to find that the stadium is already using some methods to entertain people during the countless number of breaks.

And of course, we took a lot of photos for later tests, had fun and drank some beer!