March 4, 2017
Finishing Strong
The continuation of V3’s interface has yielded some fruitful solutions. When I walked in the EMAR meeting room, I heard engaged discussions about the placement of forward and backward buttons from a psychological perspective. Which position would make sense for these buttons? These critical design and meticulous detail discussions among the research team members are positive signs of the future for V3.
Let’s get excited about the new changes EMAR will go through in spring quarter!
February 27, 2017
What Gender is EMAR?
The last couple of weeks have gone into trying to understand the data we collected from our first on-site research activity, as well as going back to our research questions and seeing which ones have been answered and which ones need some more work. One underlying theme the research team gathered from the research process was how EMAR was referred to as “he” by the two female students and as “it” by most of the others. This lead us to ponder about whether teenagers – and by extension – perhaps we ourselves – inherently associate robots with a gender.
February 24, 2017
How Will EMAR Recognize Emotion?
Even though winter quarter is coming to an end soon, the project’s momentum is thriving. We currently have another test date scheduled before the end. The research team is exploring scale bars for EMAR. These scale bars would reflect the stress levels the participants are feel. The technology team is building a low-fidelity prototype of V3 of EMAR, so they can gather data soon.
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
February 11, 2017
Local High School Pilot Test Review
This quarter, our team successfully conducted our first pilot test with EMAR at a local Seattle high school. We gathered qualitative data from a small group of five students, the results were important because they provided feedback that can help us improve our current prototype. Generally, the students felt that EMAR was “cute” and approachable. They were constantly engaged and interacted with EMAR’s simple questions about stress levels. The engagement was a good sign that EMAR can be interesting to teens and potentially collect data about stress.
