Highlights

Morning livestream

Evening livestream

Event planning

Early this week we began sending out the guest invitation codes to all of our guests. In order to do this we set up a tool to scan through the lists of guests, assign them invitation codes, plug that information into an email, and send them out in large batches. After assessing the amount of work facing us this week, we held back the emails to those who indicated that they had Mac computers only before we confirmed or denied that we would be able to provide a version for them. Unfortunately, with all the work left to us in this last week, a Mac version ended up not coming to a fruition. As a last minute addition, we put together a catalog of the event and had every project team, BVW team, and Visual Storytelling team put their information and link to the festival Zoom room into. By sharing this with all of our Mac guests, they were able to still take part in some of the live event that took place in Zoom, if not our virtual festival space.

Livestream

Before the livestream went off this week we had a few changes to the Visual Storytelling portion of the schedule. John and Ralph reached out to inform us that the interactive projects that they were intending to showcase in the stream were less than reliable for a day of highlight. In order to keep things easy for us with rescheduling, John and ralph agreed to join the livestream Zoom call, chat about the class, call out some successful work, and in the evening, so the recording of the Vizzie awards that they presented in class on Friday. In hindsight, this portion of the livestream had some difficulties due to the lack of structure. It ended up becoming a time to primarily talk about the course and what it brings to the curriculum, and not a highlight of student work. If this had been the intention, we would have liked to bring on Brenda, Chris, and Drew as well to talk about the courses that they teach for the immersion semester. However we were really focusing in on student work, so I believe that this was a mistake on my part. 

We also worked with Dave in the evening to join the livestream and present the First Penguin award to the most deserving BVW team for the first time. This moment was definitely a high point of the stream as we saw a huge influx of students all cheering in the stream chat.

During the week in advance of the festival, we met with the member of the livestream committee who were helping to coordinate guest hosts in the background to ensure that they were joining the Zoom call at the appropriate times to talk about their projects. We ran tech rehearsals internally to make sure that the scenes and elements that we had set up in OBS were working and ready to go for Saturday. 

All of the project teams were incredibly busy of course, but we touched in with each of them at least via text about what the expectations were of the livestream, who would be joining and when, and providing a list of questions that we prepared unique to each  of their projects.

BVW Soft Opening

On Sunday evening of this past week the BVW teams with worlds that had been selected for the synchronous experience provided us with the assets required to implement their work into our festival space by their Tuesday morning class. We wanted to use this last class as a chance to hold a similar sort of soft opening that typically happened during the day of festival itself when in person with all the faculty touring around the building. We invited the faculty, staff, some alumni, and the second year students to join the demo build throughout the class session while the BVW teams awaited them in their Zoom rooms to walk them through the experience.

This was a great chance for the BVW teams to get some reps in before the event and practice their onboarding procedures for naive guests. After this test we saw the need to create a strict schedule that the teams assigned to themselves in order to keep everyone on the teams accountable for the time that they were expected to be staffing the rooms.

With this playtest came a huge list of bugs and requests by BVW teams to change or add things to their project rooms in order to make the flow a bit clearer, like simply writing up some simple two or three word prompts to place around the space and guide the guests. 

This new influx of bugs and changes made it clear to us that it would definitely not be possible to provide a Mac build for our guests unfortunately. Some of us had it in the back of our minds that we could somehow miraculously pull off the Mac build on the last day, but after several more days of implementation and iteration, and a finalized Windows build at 10pm Friday Dec. 11, the impossibility of it became very clear.

Festival

So we made it through. Looking back on the event, the festival was a huge success all around. It certainly wasn’t without its hiccups! However with the timeline and budget that we were working on, we’re incredibly proud of and happy with the results. Each session of the virtual space had an average of 100 concurrent users at once and the livestreams both saw over 1000 views. Much of the feedback that we received about festival amounted to us capturing some sense of what makes the normal festival experience special. At the end of the event we were happy to see a collection of all ETC students moving from project room to project room in the virtual space hanging out as an after party. If nothing else, we feel successful in bringing together the first fully remote ETC class and looping them into the greater ETC family despite never being with many of each other in person.

We’re looking forward to deep, deep sleep to catch up on and preparations for final presentations next week.

Direct Calling

Combing through the data that we’ve gathered from our synchronous playtest on Nov. 22, we found a sizable amount of desire for the ability to form a private call with other attendees while still walking around the space. Testers found the chat booths either limiting or difficult to use with a group on the move. After looking into some of the features available for Photon Voice, we found that folding in support for a direct calling system would be relatively straightforward, but there was a major question about how to present this option to our guests in such a way that would not overwhelm them with options or menus.

For this reason we decided to split the voice chat systems into two main purposes. Chat booths can be walked into and will directly activate your microphone and broadcast it to anyone within the same chatbooth as you. This is convenient for large groups and the automatic nature of it prevents confusion due to navigating a connection list or call accept/decline list. The direct call feature will be limited to one-to-one calling, accessed through another user’s profile page. Selecting call will trigger an ‘accept call’ screen on the receiver’s end. Once you are both in this call, you are unable to enter a chat booth or join a new call until the first call is disconnected. Again, the focus here is on keeping calls clear for users in regards to who they are talking to at any time, and they cannot connect to two calls at once.

Tutorial

The other major thing that we saw from our playtest on Nov. 22 was a major need for technical help with onboarding and explaining features. We had about 70 guests in a Zoom call and about 45 of them were completely naive. While we’re incredibly happy with how this playtest went and all the feedback we got from it, we began to get worried about the potential of our team to easily and clearly provide tech support through the event. A tutorial was always on the board for us, but it became a priority following break. We needed to get anything that we could into the project as a resource for guests to use to help them to self-troubleshoot. Three hours can go by incredibly quickly in the festival, and ten, fifteen, twenty minutes waiting for tech support won’t do for the event.

We’re pulling inspiration from the tutorial level of Cuphead for our tutorial. It will just be a 2D hallway that highlights all the interactables and features of the project. It will also be optional, allowing guests to choose to take part or not, depending on their prior experience. Clicking on Wiffy in the personal room will bring up this tutorial level at any time.

Hopefully this will help to triage some of the easier tech support needs away from our main help Zoom room, leaving it open only for those who truly need help with a bug.

Jury

This week we received the final decisions from jury regarding which BVW projects had been accepted to the festival. We’ll be featuring synchronous BVW work in the festival space and asynchronous BVW work on the website for public download.

The final list is:

Virtual Space (synchronous)

Website (asynchronous)

9 Take You to the Light

10 Tone of Freedom

11 Peekaboo

12 Paper Crane

14 Under the Bloody Moon

32 A Story About Foot Binding

33 Spy Guy

35 Scrapbook

36 Let Me Be Your Eyes

Each of the teams submitted a plan for their BVW rooms within the festival space. However, there is a great deal of iteration required on their end to provide us with all of the appropriate assets for their project. We looked over everything that they had submitted to us to document their plans and gave them feedback on Thursday.

We are requiring that they turn in their room templates to us by Sunday evening so that we can push to implement them in the space and have everything ready for their BVW class on Tuesday for them to get a chance to see it all in the world.

Softs

We had soft presentations early this week and they went generally well. Some of the major questions we were asked can be addressed here. 

1. How do I find someone in the virtual space?
   • While there’s no way for us to have a public guest list tracking who is where and when, we have implemented the direct call feature which allows guests to connect when they stumble across one another and keep track of each other when separated.
2. Is there a uniform identification or nametag system?
   • 
   • Each avatar has a profile which guests can enter their personal information into including: job, email, and bio. We love the suggested idea of forcing certain identifications onto ETC students, faculty and staff. We’re working on implementing a system that will display standardized identifications for a select set of individuals directly underneath their name in the world including: ETC First Year Student, ETC Second Year Student, ETC CloudWorks, ETC Faculty, and ETC Staff. This way we can clearly communicate to our guests who is who and who may be able to answer their questions. We’ll be using our guest database system to be setting this up with each person’s login information.
3. What’s the plan for a Mac build?
   • This is definitely where we felt the most push back and had the most discussion after the fact. Early in the semester we were working to host the festival in the browser using WebGL, but we found that it was incapable of accommodating the more reliable plugins that were becoming necessities for the experience. So we made a difficult decision to focus our development timeline on providing a robust Windows build. After some feedback we decided to put a Mac build into our final week’s schedule as a stretch goal. We knew that in order to provide a Mac build, some of the main functionalities that rely on Windows calls would have to be removed, making the Mac version more of a Beta build, but would at least give these users some access to the space. In order to prevent a double merge late in the project, we need to wait until the Windows version is complete and ready to go for the festival so that we can branch it off and develop the Mac version. This means we will only have about two days to work on this, if everything goes according to plan. We’re looking at next week optimistically, but know that we’re looking down the barrel of a lot of work to accomplish and only so many hands to do it. In an ideal scenario, there will be a Mac build, but we will need to update this news next week.

Hellweek

As scary as it is to put into words–festival is next week!

As we look forward, we will be holding a final playtest of the BVW space to help train the first year students on hosting and expose any issues with their rooms. We will also be rushing through the entire week to implement the BVW rooms, make changes based on the playtest, chase down final missing assets, rehearse, set up our database registry, and send out invitation codes. Fingers crossed that the six of us survive to Sunday. See you at Festival!

In advance of the playtest this week we’ve been pushing to implement as many environment and interface updates as possible to get them in front of a large set of users. First among the environments is the Visual Story Theater. 

This space is inspired by a cabaret, night-time theater, with a darker, redder color palette. The space is populated by ticket booths, bars, and wall decorations to support this atmosphere.

Around the space are platforms representing each Visual Story team, who have all been working together for the entire semester. On each of these platforms are TV’s, that when clicked on will pop up a video of each project they worked on together. There is also a stack of newspapers on the platforms that guests can leave comments at about the work that they saw, acting as a review section. 

Similar to the BVW area, there are exits from the space on the left and right-hand sides of the theater that will teleport guests back to their personal rooms.

Project Park

We’ve also implemented the Project Park environment for guests to enter into as well as the BVW area. This area is themed around a park and features paths leading around the whole area, from statue to statue and over two small rivers that run through the space. The platforms that the statues are located on each have a frame on them that, when clicked will open up the project’s halfsheet with a description of that project. This way a guest will be able to find out what a project is about before entering a call with them. Clicking on the statue will launch the Zoom call that the teams will be waiting in.

Some of the other semester projects have begun submitting their statues representing their projects within the park. We’ve started to implement these, along with some placeholder logos for the rest of the teams. Each project’s statue will float, rotating above a plinth in the park setting. 

Similar to the BVW area, there are exits from the space on the top left and right-hand sides of the park that will teleport guests back to their personal rooms.

BVW Area

In the BVW area, we’ve added more chat booths around the entire space, including several smaller chat booths on the left and right sides for smaller group conversations. We’ve also added in the environment assets provided by the art committee. Each project room has been updated to appear as a carnival tent. On top of these tents are signs with the project name and a sprite art asset. There is also space to the left of the tent is a space dedicated to a signature model that represents the project. We’ve given everyone in BVW the list of requirements that each project must submit when submitting their project to jury.

For the purposes of the playtest we’ve opened up our project to hosting Round 5 BVW projects that would like to try laying out a BVW room and hosting a Zoom call to playtest their own worlds. We had seven BVW teams ask to join our Nov. 22 playtest. Each of these teams submitted a stand-alone build of their project, a map of how they would like to lay out their rooms, environment assets, instruction assets, and a Zoom link that they will staff during the playtest.

Onboarding Updates

The onboarding animation featuring Wiffi has been updated with iterated art and text welcoming guests to the space.

In the avatar system we’ve both emphasized the interactive arrows in the menu to ensure that guests know what to click on and when to do so. We’ve eliminated some of the unnecessary information on the screen at the same time that was pulling away from the focal points. We’ve also built out and implemented many new avatar assets in this system as well, including new shirts and new hairs.

After they go through this entire process they will be dropped into their personal room as always, but the theming and organization of this room has been updated to now match the UFO theme provided by the teleportation feature from area to area. The wardrobe is now open, inviting guests to interact with it in order to change their appearance. Instead of a rotating portal taking them to a new area, there is a teleportation platform that they should walk to instead.

UI Updates

After our playtests from last week we found that we needed to make some changes to the UI to make everything more navigable for a naive user. First we made the festival .exe launch in windowed mode. We found that it was difficult to predict when a BVW project or a Zoom call would launch behind the festival window reliably. This inevitably and understandably caused a  lot of confusion for guests who would launch something, see no change, but suddenly be plagued by an unstoppable soundtrack of a game for example. By making the whole experience windowed, it now becomes much more obvious when a call or project launches outside of the build, and is much easier to switch back and forth between these things.

Within each of the spaces,  we’ve added a mini-map to the bottom right hand corner that will constantly be up to help show your location in relation to the rest of the space. Clicking on the mini-map will also launch the larger, detailed map with which they may interact to find specific projects. Some of our playtesters had trouble finding the map initially, or didn’t even know that there was a map available, so keeping it on screen will help to show them what is available more readily.

We’ve also made the interactive objects within each area (download buttons, videos, Zoom links, etc.) clickable instead of accessible by a hotkey. We found that there was a disconnect for some testers in knowing when to use their mouse to interact with the world and when to use their keyboard. Because of this we are leaning into streamlining all interactions primarily through the mouse. 

Event Updates

This week, we asked Caitlin to send out a reminder email to all invited guests asking them to RSVP by the deadline of Nov. 24. After we did this we saw a pretty sizeable jump in the number of RSVP’s and now we’re at just shy of 400 confirmed attendees. Luckily, the guests are still signing up roughly evenly for each session, so the festival should be equally lively for each portion.

We’ve been populating the student page of the website with small bios and photos of each ETC student and that can be viewed here!

Livestream Committees

Late in the week we met with the students who have offered to help with the livestream. Two of the BVW art TA’s have offered to help create visual effects and environments for the livestream for use in OBS. They’ll be providing individual environments supporting one host, two hosts, three hosts, and window frames customized for the BVW and project portions of the stream.

Several BVW students have also offered to help out with the stream itself. They will be helping to run rehearsals of the stream after Thanksgiving break next week and acting as a stage director, organizing and messaging the guest hosts to keep them flowing into the stream at the appropriate times.

The Playtest to End All Playtests

All this week we’ve been building up to the playtest on Sunday. We sent out invitations to all ETC students, faculty, staff, and alumni and scared up 70 people to playtest with us synchronously, which will likely be our largest true user playtest before the festival. 

Contrary to previous playtests in which we gave testers very specific goals to accomplish, our protocol this time around was to essentially just ask them to experience the festival. All of our testers joined a Zoom call at the start of the playtest and had received a link to download the project ahead of time. After welcoming them to the playtest we unleashed them onto the world to see everywhere that it would gloriously break. It was truly magical to see so many people going through the space at once.

We kept the Zoom call open throughout the playtest for live troubleshooting and question answering, and troubleshooting there was.

There were a few initial hiccups that need to be addressed that affected the playtest, however. First were issues with the voice chat functionality. As of Sunday we were still waiting for approval to purchase the higher level subscription of Photon Voice that supports 1000 concurrent users. Because of this, we were using a free version of Photon Voice that only supports 30 concurrent users. So for moments when we had more than 30 people trying to connect across all of our different chat booths, anyone else joining beyond that initial 30 would not be able to connect. This made the voice chatting confusing and unreliable. Now that we’ve been approved for purchase on the better plan, though, this issue should be fixed.

The other issue that we ran into was Dropbox placing a limitation on downloads for a free account. We were hosting all project file downloads on a personal, free Dropbox account temporarily. We got an email halfway through the playtest that the external downloads were locked for all files on the account because it had hit the limit for the free account. This ended up causing all downloads after this point in the playtest to fail, so after a point, people were only able to watch videos and anter Zoom calls. 

We’re still taking the time to go through all of the feedback and discussion that happened during and after the playtest, so we will update on the blog next week with that information. However, this playtest went incredibly well and was the best thing to happen for our project to give us a sense of what the festival will be like. Yes, there were plenty of bugs, issues, confusions and more, but everything that we saw and have been digesting after the fact is incredibly helpful for building out the project and getting us to the festival on Dec. 12. This was the best possible simulation of the festival and opened our eyes to a lot of overlooked issues that we can focus on ironing out.

Next Week

Heading into next week we’ll be combing through all the feedback from the playtest and figuring out where we go from here and how to prioritize. It’s Thanksgiving break as well, so we’ll take a few days off, but we’ll be back with a vengeance for Soft Opening directly after.

Way back at the beginning of the project our plan was to have the project playable through a browser using WebGL to set it up. Because of this decision, and our need to have voice chat features available, we had been using WebRTC to provide this communication as it was the only provider of voice chat that was compatible with WebGL. 

However we have been planning on having a stand-alone build downloaded for the festival instead of browser support for a number of weeks now. Because of this, we’ve decided to shift our voice chat to using Photon Voice, because it is far more stable and has far less hoops to jump through to activate the microphone than WebRTC. Not only is the connection typically stronger, it also activates more reliably. We’re currently using a free version to try it out, but it only supports up to 30 concurrent users. We’re requesting a higher level version that will be able to support 1000 concurrent users for the festival.

UI Updates

After last week’s playtest, we have designed and implemented some changes to the settings menu, allowing users to alter the volume of the music, SFX, chat rooms, and broadcasting. This way guests will be able to customize their settings in real time to make sure that they can hear everything they would like to–or not hear for that matter.

Also within the settings menu is a space for them to add personal information describing themselves. This will act similar to the name tags that get handed out at the festival normally. They will be able to put in a descriptor of their job title or project affiliation and ‘About me’. When you click on another avatar within the space a profile pop up will appear showing their information around their name.

On this same pop up is a report button in the bottom left corner. This report button is how we will be doing live moderation of the guests. If one guest starts to act out, breaking the term of access that they agreed to at the start of the festival, another guest can click on their profile, open the report menu, and register a report for hate speech, sexually explicit speech, spam, or other. Once we receive these reports, we can revoke this individual’s chat abilities to prevent them from continuing the behavior.

The map is also now fully interactive, allowing guests to click on either the name of a project from the list, or the icon of a project on the map to highlight it. Their position in the world will be updated in real time with a red dot. Each area will have their own maps and within the personal room there will be a schedule of events, guest list, and space to update their profile information.

Mechanical Turk Playtest

On Thursday of this week we ran a small scale Mechanical Turk playtest with ten users to try it out before committing to a larger one to stress test later. The testers were asked to log in simultaneously and interact with the world. However we ran into an issue with this format, because after trying it out and looking at their responses to the test afterwards, we found that the majority of them did not actually go through the process of downloading and entering the world. So we’re in a bit of a pickle here about how best to stress test it. We’re currently looking at options to only pay for those users who we can confirm downloaded and entered the world and went through our prompts, but until then MTurk is looking less than trustworthy to rely on for simultaneous stress testing.

Onboarding Animation

After we spoke with Dave this week about his participation in the livestream representing BVW, we asked about using Quasi as the mascot of the festival. We decided that it would be better to create our own character to represent the ETC and our project. So we hit the drawing board to plan out a character inspired by our project.

For these purposes we’re happy to introduce Wiffi! Wiffi pulls their name from Wi-Fi and is a cloud, both symbolizing the remote presentation format for this year’s festival. Wiffi;s design is inspired by the old ‘rubber-hose’ style of animation that we’ve pulled inspiration from for the rest of our project. 

We put together some storyboards using Wiffi and implemented them to onboard guests, asking them to log in and explaining how they should behave in the space.

BVW Committee Updates

This week from the BVW committees we’ve received most of the environmental assets to be added to the BVW area, including the overhead buttons for downloading projects and entering Zoom calls. 

From the sound committee we’ve also received the playlists for the personal room and avatar customization screen.

The website committee has started brainstorming and storyboarding an animation to play at the frontpage of the website to welcome guests in and explain the new format of the festival.

Environment Updates

For the BVW area, we have cut down on the number of rooms within the space to help lessen the amount of walking necessary by guests. We’ve also added more space between the BVW project rooms for ‘landmark’ features–pulled from the art committee–to help guests to navigate the space and know where they are. This will also help to lessen the sense of walking on a treadmill that we’ve heard from some playtesters.

Within the BVW rooms, we’ve made them wider to add more space for guests and more decorations from the teams. We’ve solidified the features that will be available for each team as:

• Chat booth
• Downloading station
• Zoom link
• Comment station
• Instruction screen

The typical flow for guests will be from left to right. There will be a chat booth near the entrance followed by the download space, represented by a four-sided arcade machine, kept constant in each room. At the center along the back wall will be the trigger to launch the Zoom room to meet with the team. This space can be customized by the team to match their art assets. As they walk to the right to leave, there will be a space that they can leave comments for the team after they play, currently represented by a computer. Once they exit the room on the right, they will be put out on the right side of the tent in the global BVW area.

One-on-One Playtests

At the end of this week we sent out individual invitations to faculty and alumni that we wanted specific input from on certain parts of our project. We’d talked with many of these people throughout our process so we wanted to get some input on our iteration. 

We asked each guest to go through the onboarding process and try out each of the features that we currently have implemented including:

• Avatar creation
• Avatar editing
• Project downloading
• Project launching
• Text chatting
• Voice chatting
• Broadcast listening
• Settings changing
• Map navigation
• Profile customization
• Reporting
• Image viewing
• Video viewing

From these playtests we are looking to implement an ability to copy another guests profile information, as a way to simulate the exchange of business cards. We also saw that there was some confusion around when other characters were taking actions, so we are looking to amend this. For example, it was occasionally confusing when trying to determine which avatar was currently speaking, or if another avatar was currently not active within the world, playing a BVW world. We also saw a lot of confusion around our avatar customization UI, so we are looking at ways to streamline this menu to limit the number of things on screen to keep attention focused on the interactive areas. There was also some difficulty for our playtesters around Zoom windows and BVW worlds launching behind the fullscreen festival .exe window, making it difficult to alternate between these different windows.

We also got some feedback on our decision to limit the project to a Windows build. This decision was made early on because some of our core features, like downloading and launching BVW projects would not be possible on a Mac. However, we recognize that there are many individuals who only have access to a Mac, so we are now looking at options to support these users. The timeline for this is entirely dependent on our ability to complete the Windows version in time because this is our absolute priority. Supporting Mac users would be fantastic and we will do our best to be able to. We’ve requested a Mac from the ETC to try testing and developing on it, but we won’t be able to dedicate time to it until after Thanksgiving, if at all.

Next Week

Our big push for next week is another playtest we are planning for on Sunday, Nov. 22. We are planning for this playtest for be synchronous for as many testers as possible to simulate the festival experience as best as we can. For this test we’ll be looking to have both the Project Park and the Visual Storytelling Theater environments implemented to have our testers navigate from one area to another and experience each different type of project available at the festival.

On Monday afternoon we met again to try stress testing using the headless client in a newly organized virtual festival space. Last week we found that the way in which our world was set up meant that when greater than 300 guests would join the festival, no matter what space they were in, guests would begin to experience severe amounts of lag that prove detrimental to the experience of the play.

This is because the whole space was directly connected to itself and hosted on a single server. So if 100 people were in the Visual Story Theatre, BVW Carnival, and Project Park each, they would all be experiencing lag. If we factor in the number of students and faculty who may be concurrently within the space, that is already severely restricting the number of guests we can possibly accommodate.

Our new global structure eliminates the shared central lobby space in favor of a private, local, personal room from which each of the other areas of the festival can be accessed. After going through the onboarding animation sequence detailing the experience, they will create their avatars and be dropped into this room. From here they will go through a portal that they may choose between two BVW areas, the Visual Storytelling Theatre, and the Project Park, each hosted on a different server. Each one of these will support up to 180 guests at any given time.

We are limiting each area to 180 guests because we found that this is just under our safety number for when people begin to experience lag. By cutting under this, we can ensure that everyone should be able to maintain a steady connection to the event. We’ve split BVW into two spaces because we anticipate this being a ‘hot zone’. Doing this spreads the load across two rooms. By having these four distinct rather than connected areas, we can now support 720 people each session simultaneously, which is greater than what we were anticipating at 500.

If a guest attempts to join an area that is currently at 180 guests, they will not be able to connect and will need to go somewhere else instead. Because we are still limiting the number of possible guests per session under that 720 number, though, we are ensuring that gridlock doesn’t occur where each room will fill up, locking anyone out.

After stress testing with this new system, we found that it was able to support 200 concurrent users very stably, so we are confident in this new direction.

Space Updates

We’re making a few changes to the BVW space itself as well, and implementing the map to go along with it. The map lists off each of the projects available within the space and where to find them in comparison with your position. Soon this will be fully interactive and allow you to click on each project name to highlight it on the map and see where you need to walk to from your current location.

Before guests are able to join the world, we are planning a short onboarding process to welcome them in and we have prepared the script for that. It will feature Quasi from the ETC lobby to introduce them to the space and the procedures. He’ll ask them for their log-in information and say hello, and give them a heads up about our behavior policy, ensuring that they know to respect everyone else in the festival.

Semester Project Touch-in

In the first half of the week we had meetings set with each semester-long project to touch base about expectations for the festival, both on our side and theirs. We haven’t gotten a chance to address everyone directly yet and had only heard what everyone was doing through their half presentations. This was a great opportunity to hear from each team what their deliverables will be and how they can best showcase their work in their Zoom calls and on the livestream. For a few teams, this also raised the question of how to navigate around their NDA’s, and we are waiting to hear back from their clients about how we can address their concerns throughout the event.

From each team we are asking for a 3D voxel art statue to represent their projects. This statue will be what guests will walk up to in order to launch a Zoom call and talk with the team. The ultimate appearance of each of these statues can be determined by the projects themselves. We are asking for these pieces before Thanksgiving break so that we can begin populating the project area before the BVW jury submissions come in. We’ll also be asking for the project videos from each team, but we won’t be able to get those until the week of the festival.

For the livestream, one representative will join a Zoom call to talk about their projects for about ten minutes. They’ll show their video and answer some questions that we will have prepared and had approved by them in advance of the festival. This way they will have a sense of what to expect and prepare some thoughtful answers.

BVW Consultations

In the latter half of the week we held consultation sessions with each BVW team as well to get them prepared for the festival. In class they are just now beginning Round 5, in which they are supposed to design an experience with the festival in mind.

This was a chance to hear some of what they were planning for the festival and gently push them into directions that would make their experiences run well, given the presentation format. All of the teams are considering multi-guest experiences, so we asked them questions about how they planned to onboard and engage with guests as they flow in and out of the sessions. We pushed them to think about how they are planning to adjust for issues of latency, length of time to learn and play, accessibility, number of concurrent users, spectators, and so on. 

Because their work will be directly interacted with, as opposed to most of the semester projects, it is very important that they begin considering these issues in the very first week of the project, rather than the week of jury.

Invitations Sent

On Friday morning, our invitations were emailed out to ~3000 invited guests. We’ve already had about 100 responses so far confirming their attendance. We were worried about which sessions people would want to attend, fearful that one session may get gobbled up by everyone, leaving one particularly quiet. It’s early in the process now, but responses are roughly equal between the three sessions so far.

Navigation Playtest

On Friday evening, we held another playtest to try out our broadcasting system and inter-area navigation. We set the BVW world up with three active BVW rooms. When you walked up to the game console that you normally download the BVW games from, instead of getting the game, you receive a pop-up UI giving you a description of an item from our avatar asset list. Each room has either a hair+color, shirt+color, or bottoms+color. We had also gotten our first background musics from the sound committee to try out in the world.

For the playtest, the testers were asked to 

1. Join the BVW area 
2. Listen for a broadcast telling them which rooms to find these messages in
3. Collect these messages
4. Go back to their starting room
5. Change their avatar to match the descriptions from the messages
6. Join a Zoom call with us from one of the rooms to finish

We tested with 15 people and all but one were able to get the messages and get dressed accordingly. We ran into some issues with the volume of the music, because it could not be changed at the moment, so it was very difficult to hear what the global audio broadcast was saying. There was also confusion and frustration around how to get back to the starting room from the BVW area, because there was very little populating the environment, despite its large size, and they were forced to walk all the way from the left side to the right side of the space. They felt that they weren’t making much progress as they moved because there was very little to differentiate the space.

Moving forward from this we are going to add in a settings menu to allow them to customize their audio setting so they can fine tune their volumes. We will also be adding more elements to the environment to help guests wayfind and differentiate certain areas. Part of this will be amended by the division of the BVW area into two, cutting down the number of actual rooms and space required to fit them by a great deal, making it much quicker to move around.

Next Week

Next week we’ll be looking to do more one-on-one sessions of the experience to get some more in depth feedback and in-process thoughts from faculty and alumni playtesters. We’ll also be doing a small scale Mechanical Turk playtest to try it out before potentially committing to a full, several hundred user MTurk test.

Of course the big moment from this week was our ½ presentation, checking in at the midway point of the semester. We’ll get to that shortly, and talk about some of the questions that were raised from and general response to it, but first we should touch on the other in-roads we’ve made with the project.

Avatar Pipeline Testing

Coming out of the weekend we tested our avatar submission process with a BVW student, Lauren. Cara has been working on establishing a pipeline that should allow anyone to submit art assets to the avatar database, including hairs/hats, shirts and pants. Submitters will need to get a piece of concept art approved by the team, then create a series of sprite sheets for their asset for a portrait, idle, and walk animation, all using the template that Cara set up. Lauren submitted concept art the previous week and drew it over the weekend, letting us meet with her to discuss the process and any hiccups.

After talking with her we are going to move forward with what we have and attempt to test it with a non-BVW artist. Dave mentioned how much fun his daughter had in our playtest and how she would love to submit art for the avatars, so we did just that. We’ve asked Dave to have her submit concept art and are having him create one of these pieces over the weekend to see how it goes for him.

Schedule Approval

We met with our faculty committee early in this week to formally pitch our one day with three slots schedule to them for approval. Drew, Shirley, and Dave plan to talk this over together and with the other members of faculty after our presentation and during the next faculty meeting to ensure that this is okay, but as we wait now, things sounded promising.

Establishing Subcommittees

Festival has always been an event where everyone plays a role, and this year the preparation started early. And we’re happy to welcome in more students to participate with explicit pipelines and responsibilities that joining committees actually allows each student to make small design decisions, making this festival even more creative and exciting.

This is a continuation of what we were planning with the avatar open submission pipeline, but in a more structured format. This started from a need to get sound assets for the world, as no one on the team feels comfortable enough creating polished bg musics and SFX, and has expanded to subcommittees for website UI, environment art, sound, production, and the livestream. 

For the livestream subcommittee, we folded in AJ Johri, a BVW art TA to help us in generating assets for use in OBS with the broadcast, because of his experience with the platform.

Annie introduced the committees out to the BVW class this week and we are waiting for their responses to the form. This process will also help us to get buy in from the BVW students, who very likely feel less connected to the festival that at any other time.

Environment Navigation

After some of the feedback from ½’s and a meeting with Ricardo afterwards about our environment, we decided that we needed to focus on this aspect of the world for a little bit and did a group brainstorm on how to lay out the entire world to guide our guests around. 

From this we are looking at laying out our environment in a three leaf clover pattern, with Visual in a room to the west, BVW in a room to the north, and projects in a room to the east. We were theming these areas as the Visual Story Theatre, the BVW Arena, and the Project Village. We really liked the ideas of having ‘doormats’ at the entry and exit ways to each area to keep this styling consistent, and giving guests the ability to move from any one room to any other.

Looking forward into next week we are focusing our brainstorming on navigation through the BVW portion of festival specifically. This is from both an environment perspective and an internal guest flow per room perspective

Invitations

We met with Caitlyn, who is typically in charge of emailing out guest invitations to talk about the process of collecting guests this year. We passed along a survey and email with information specifically calling out what festival will be like this year. That survey to collect guest names and timezones went out to all ETC students and faculty and we are closing it in about a week and a half before sending the invitations out.

Servers and Website

Late in the week we met with Steve and Bryan to explain our network diagram to him and talk about how we can best support the festival. He will be setting up 16 servers for us to use, 8 physical and 8 virtual to help us out. 

He also helped to get our festival website set up so using wordpress so that we can make the most of our backup plan in the case of a system failure the day of. This would allow guests with invitation codes to access the links to the Zoom calls that would normally have been within our project. Now that this framework is established, we’ll be able to move much more quickly on designing the layout of the website to get it in front of guests sooner.

Halves

So of course, ½’s were also this week. In the process of preparing, we came to see that the design pillars that we initially set for ourselves, camaraderie, engagement, and interaction had become too vague to be helpful, so we workshopped those keeping in mind what the most important aspects of our project have been and we realized that camaraderie was truly core to our festival experience. We also felt that guest-oriented and project-oriented better fit the project than the initial two. These pillars help to capture the focus on the guests experience and the ability to see and access student work through the festival.

The response that we received from our presentation was generally positive form the faculty, which we were very happy about. 

Questions from Faculty

We were asked the following questions afterwards which we can address some here:

1. Is there training or some type of onboarding for groups in the festival to learn best practices for getting people to come to their experience and how to handle guest in general. —–from Ricardo
   1. We are establishing a framework for BVW teams to introduce guests to their project and welcome them from festival. There will also be a script in place for helping them to navigate back to the festival window. We will be rehearsing some of this as we get closer to the day of.
2. How are we playtesting for experience to ensure that 500 guests at a time is actually an enjoyable experience, not just a stable one? —–from Mo
   1. We are looking at using stacked recordings of a player moving around the space and sending messages to see how these movements and text entries may flood the screen. We also plan on using Mechanical Turk later in the semester to get an actual stress test done with real people in place to help visualizing this as well.
3. Is the turnaround time on expected response to the RSVP too soon, especially considering there’s no need to plan around fitting people into the physical space? ——from Carl
   1. The turnaround time on RSVP (Nov. 2-Nov. 24) is pulled from the typical festival invitation time. While we have the advantage of not need to work around scheduling the physical ETC building, we do want to get a final headcount as soon as we can to ensure what we are working with and assign everyone to a session of the festival.
4. When you want to chat with someone is there identification so that you know who that person is? ——from Ralph
   1. Each avatar will have a name above them that will be pulled from their invitations. Further, for alumni of te ETC, they can wear a shirt on their avatar, which will display their year of graduation. Hopefully as well, their avatar will somewhat resemble their real appearance, so hopefully these things working in conjunction will help to show who’s who.

Starting late last week and continuing mostly into this week we set up appointments with a bunch of alumni who had initially responded to a survey we sent out early in the semester. We wanted to get some first hand knowledge about the festival experience from people who had experienced all stages of it, as a first year, a second year, and as a guest.

We were looking to get information from them about how exactly they navigated around festival and how they decided which projects and worlds to visit, as well as finding out who they were hoping to spend time with.

Generally what we found from the alumni is that they relied on the festival heavily as a social experience and navigated around it as such. One of almost all of their primary motivations was catching up with people. By talking to fellow alumni and faculty in the context of festival they also got suggestions for projects to check out, and relied on this network to tailor the experience down into something more manageable.

New Schedule

The primary update that we have for this week is around scheduling. When we started this semester, we hoped to extend the festival out across a whole week, unlike any previous year. As we got into it a bit more we realized that spreading it out so much would cause the experience to be too diluted as guests would be joining at odd moments when they had free time and we’d lose the richness of the singular night event.

We’ve had a plan in place for several weeks now revolving around a three day event started by two of livestreams and culminating in the virtual festival experience solo on Sunday. After thinking about it this last week, we’ve seen that by preceding the virtual festival with two days of livestreams we would end up covering redundant information in what is intended to be the highlighted, VIP experience.This means that invited guests wouldn’t have a reason to tune in to the livestream, or if they view the livestream, they have less of a reason to join the Sunday session. There is also the ever-present concern about what we are asking and expecting of guests and students. Are we communicating clearly enough what exactly we expect guests to attend/view? Are we asking students to work too many hours just to host the festival, ending up totaling around 20 hours of festival time?

To address these concerns we are condensing the festival back down into a single day. On this day there will be three sessions of the virtual festival experience, in the morning, afternoon, and evening, and a livestream of each of these sessions as well. By shrinking it back we are hoping to create a more impactful experience because we are funneling all our guests into a single day, instead of letting themselves spread out across three days.

We’ll also be solving the issue of how much we are asking of each student. During a one day event, each project team will be able to split the virtual festival sessions into shifts that they will work according to their convenience and preference, ending up with about 3-4.5 hours total depending on both the sizes and numbers of their teams in festival, which is much closer to their typical expectations for a normal festival.

Overall this new schedule will help us to address our three types of audience: waders, swimmers, and divers, who all differ in regard to how deeply they want to jump into the overall festival experience. Condensing it down gives us the ability to accommodate all of these audiences at once.

Guest Flow Options

In early stage of the development, we evaluated our choices based on our testing results and how to balance easier guest experience and student work loads. As we decided to move forward, we faced another problem that to incorporate Zoom calls in our build requires the guests to jump across applications a lot between Zoom app and our PC build. We decided to reevaluate our design decisions, with the focus on the guest flow through the experience. This is a more in-depth evaluation because not only do we know more about tech from testings, we’ve also learned more about what ‘projects’ we’re expecting to support on the Festival. We took in consideration of Zoom communication, project needs, virtual space needs, and what those mean in terms of guest flow.

Why do we Need Zoom?

We are designing an implementing BVW rooms for each BVW project. These rooms will feature an interactive object that will directly download and subsequently launch project builds. There will also be an area of the room that will trigger the launch of a Zoom call that will have the BVW or 2nd year project team waiting in it to either run the world together or to talk about the work.

Zoom provides the most direct and robust video chat experience, so we decided to develop our virtual space with the help of Zoom, that we’ll send our guests to a Zoom room for more in-depth talk and certain experiences. Our virtual build can run simultaneously with Zoom, that said, each guest can be in a Zoom room with others while still running around in the virtual space in their avatars.

Plan A: A Local Build

One option we are looking at is still, a local version of the festival, which would instead be a .exe downloaded from the festival website and installed on their PC’s. This is far easier for us to build because we know that all of the plug-ins work stably, but the guest experience may be a little less than ideal as we ask them to navigate from a window of the festival, to a window for Zoom, to a window for a BVW world and back again. After consulting with Dave and Shirley on these options, we think that this is the path we will pursue, primarily because having a stable and functional experience is among the highest priorities for us.

Plan B: Develop with webGL

Another option is to host the festival build on a festival website using webGL. The web page would feature two windows. One on the left would hold the virtual festival space. On the right would be an embedded Zoom call that begins as guests join from BVW and project rooms. This path is much more straightforward for a guest to experience, as they will stay in one window for nearly the entire festival, but it will be much more difficult to get working stably. Many of the plugins that we are using currently to support our chatting and broadcasting systems likely won’t work using WebGL.

After multiple discussions with faculties, we decided to go with our Plan A, and focus on iterating the ‘jumping between the applications’. Plan B comes with too many restrictions on development, and it is harder to manage comparing to a local build. And we immediately started preparing for our playtest on Friday to test on the guest flow to help us refine our ‘Plan A’.

Avatar System and UI Updates

Within the festival itself, we’ve made some iterations on the existing UI for the avatar system and the onboarding introduction. We’ve started to apply the ‘Festival of Tomorrow’ theme to the work, pulling out color palettes, typefaces, and art styles inspired by it. With the onboarding animation, we currently have the friendly face of Quasi, a recognizable ETC ‘celebrity’ to guide the guest in, which provides them a welcoming and familiar experience to something new.

Playtesting: for Guest Flow

We playtested our first prototype of this in one-on-one sessions on Friday, asking the testers to use think-aloud protocol to explain their thoughts, feelings, and actions during their activity. They were asked to join the festival by logging in, ‘create’ their avatar(system not yet implemented), and then navigate to two different buildings that would do two different things: download and launch a build, and launch a Zoom call that was screen sharing an AirConsole project. 

What’s Next?

Next week we’re stressing about ½’s presentations first and foremost. We’re also looking to set some time to check in with Janice Metz and Caitlyn Zunic to get the ball rolling on the festival invitation process.

This week we were excited to begin to stress test our project for the first time at any kind of scale. We wanted to run this stress test internally as much as possible for ease of planning, so we made use of headless clients running simultaneously on each of our computers. Jim and Alan created a headless client server that would simulate the network load of ten simultaneous users. Among our team running several copies of this application, we simulated 80 concurrent users.

Performance during the stress test was overall very stable from a network perspective. The primary bugs that we ran into were extant ones from the project itself, and not issues with the networking. With the current setup we anticipate being able to accommodate 150 concurrent users stably, but are working on expanding that up to the 300-500 user range.

BVW Implementation

We have also started to work on using some of the existing, and most stable BVW projects to experiment downloading from the virtual festival space. We’ve decided to use a project from round two, team 17. This world makes use of a microphone so it is a good choice as our project will also use their microphones periodically. This gives us a chance to test how the two programs will interact with one another.

Pre-event Experience

From an event planning perspective, we’ve been thinking ahead to the moment of first contact with our invited guests. We’ve been planning from the outset to try and send something physical out as a piece of swag to our guests. We want to try and connect people physically as much as possible to our digital experience.

Thinking about the typical festival, and talking with some previous attendees, one of the most important aspects of festival for so many was, unfortunately for us, the food and drink. While we can’t exactly send hors d’oeuvres out through the mail, we are looking into things like customized tumblers for a cocktail, encouraging guests to come to festival with their own drinks.

We also looked at earbuds in a customized box. The main reason for this is in part to ensure that everyone joins the festival with headphones of some kind to limit the amount of cross contamination of audio when entering into voice chat. We wont be able to make use of the same background noise eliminating features that Zoom has, so when people are chatting in our world, background noise is much more prevalent and feedback from the speakers is as well.

While we’d love to have this as a part of the experience, we are also sensitive to those who do not want to get something that they would not use, so we can offer it as an opt in choice during the RSVP.

What’s Next?

Beck had reached out to the alumni that agreed for further followups from our first survey at the beginning of the semester. We’ve arranged some interviews with alumni to shine some more insights on how to design the virtual festival while keeping what makes the festival…, out beloved ETC Festival!

We also spoke with Sarah about her experience with Rec Room and she gave us feedback about our direction. Because we are focusing on a 2D-based space, we should have an easier time transferring data, than with VR. She also gave us a bunch of advice about how to simplify interactions by relying on things that people can expect from the real-world. The example that she gave was around making friends in Rec Room, and shaking their hand or high-fiving. We’ll be using this to help inform our environment and navigation design. We want to keep things as simple and straight-forward for guests as possible because we are expecting to see grandparents and little siblings alike in this world, so we need to hit a broad user base.

Theming!

From an event planning perspective, we got our overall theme for the festival that we’re excited to announce: The ETC Festival of Tomorrow! 

We’ve been inspired by retro-futurism for this theme. The story goes that with everything that has happened in 2020, we’ve decided to abandon ship and travel back in time to the start of the ETC. By changing the past, we changed our present to this new festival world.

Looking forward, this theme can be used for the poster that the first-year students will create in a competition in BVW, like every year.

Avatar System UI

For the virtual festival itself, Annie has been working on developing the UI for onboarding guests and designing their avatar. To onboard, an opening animation will play to introduce them to the space and ask for their name and invitation code. This code will be unique to each guest for security purposes.

The avatar system has gone through a series of iterations focused on simplicity and ease of use. Guests will be able to swap out heads, shirts, and pants, alter skin tone, and change clothing color. There will also be an ability to randomize your appearance using the dice button in the right corner.

Communication UI

We’ve been doing audits of existing communication techniques in other similar worlds like Second Life, Rec Room, and Animal Crossing, to consider how best to tackle this beast. Currently when you enter text chats, the bubble will appear directly overhead for a number of seconds until disappearing. We want to ensure that these messages are not covering the screen at all. (see from below, is one of our earliest prototype design.)

Navigation UI

For navigating around the space, we are planning to use strokes on the ground to lay paths from place to place. As the guest approaches an interactable object, like a door, a pop-up will appear with the button required to interact with it. This button will likely stay consistent through the whole experience for simplicity.

Tech Requirements

On the tech side of things, Jim and Alan have been focused on getting streaming functional in the build and increasing the stability of WebGL. We are still hoping to have the project play in a browser to increase the breadth of access for people. We are also moving development to uMMORPG instead of Photon servers, as were used in our initial prototypes. uMMORPG should be able to support more guests simultaneously for us.

It’s also important for our experience that guests are able to download project builds from within our experience, especially for BVW. Projects will be a little different with considerations for what each project’s deliverable is, but BVW at festival needs to be all about experiencing the worlds. We’re working on getting this functionality into the project as well. 

Because the festival will need to be accessed from a central website, we talked with Steve and got a domain set up here: festival.etc.cmu.edu. We’ll be updating this as we go, but for how we will be using it to test our onboarding process in later playtests.

Playtesting for Social Communication

Despite all this being said, our big event for this week was our playtest on Friday that we were really excited about. We wanted to test our text and voice chat features outside of our group. We got 15 testers to join us synchronously, with the six of us as well. Although small in eventual scale, the stability of 21 simultaneous users was promising.

Generally from the playtests, we found that people preferred speaking to one another over text chat, but as the size of the group increased the likelihood of preferring text chat also increased. This is likely due to the fact that people were talking over one another and the text chat allowed people to contribute to conversations without interrupting. 

The other thing that popped up from this playtest was that because collisions have to be on when entering the voice chat space, guests were able to push one another in or out of the voice chat area, cause them to be connected or worse, disconnected to the call. This resulted in people missing parts of conversations. We’re now looking into how we can add a buffer to the voice chat areas that will fade out the audio or ask if you want to leave to combat this. We would like to turn off the colliders, but they are required to detect who is in what spaces. We are also planning to place differently sized chat rooms around the space to accommodate different types of conversations between people.

What’s Next?

Moving forward, we’re kicking off the event planning and execution of the whole event. And some decisions must be made to help anchor our design and overall event planning.