February 19, 2017

New Directions

The EMAR team was busy this week making substantial changes to help keep things moving forward in preparation for our next round of research. Conversations focused around the research team’s coding of the findings from the last trip out into the field, topics such as facial expression codes were discussed. The engineering team settled on fixes for EMAR V2 making sure he/she/it will be functioning for the next research outing. They also discussed possible future directions for EMAR V3.

Research Team

They discussed findings from a literature review they conducted and refocused its search on to:

• Imputation: People’s tendency to perceive qualities in EMAR that don’t have a concrete root. Kind of like how people see different pictures in a Rorschach inkblot test.
• EMAR’s Affect: Which refers to EMAR’s ability to show emotions that other people can perceive. The primary focus of this is EMAR’s eyes.

 

On top of this, the research team also began working on tasks based on the data that was gathered a couple weeks ago during the high school study.

 

Engineering team

This week the team members were busy working on EMAR’s interface; trying to figure out which options are best for interaction. They decided that it’d be best to add a red “X” to signify a “No” response to EMAR and a green check button to signify “Yes”  when a person is prompted to answer a question.
Also, arrows were added to signify next (>) and a back arrow (<) to signify back, to give participants an easier way of interacting with EMAR. We tested the new design with friends.