Week 10- Finals Week

In Class:

In class we presented our findings from our dress rehearsal yesterday.  

Saturday (3/16):  

Vivian, Cindy, Yash, Lara, Nick, Lauren and I met from 11am to 4pm in the motion capture studio today to troubleshoot all of the connections in the bodysuit and make sure they are all working perfectly.  We borrowed a multimeter from Emil to test each zone and make sure they were all connected successfully to the board and not overlapping with one another anywhere.

Me testing the conductivity of each zone on the suit

Me, Vivian, and Cindy repairing broken wires

We discovered that three of the wires had snapped off right where they connected to the board, and two had pulled out of the arms of the suit.  One that pulled out of the arm detached from where it was connected to the tape and was lost inside the suit, and the other somehow retracted inside of the rubber tubing surrounding it.  I shimmied both wires around until they reached properly to their destinations and stitched them back in as securely as I could.


Interior shots of the suit and how the wires are stitched in

Once we had those wires all reconnected, the suit worked much better and we were no longer getting weird feedback errors in touch designer.  Another fix we made was sandwiching the end of each wire between two layers of tape to make sure it was connected properly and not dampened by the sticky backing of the tape.To deal with any additional interference from Cindy's skin, we also had her wear a motion capture suit under this suit to keep our sensors from accidentally touching her skin, which also helped massively.  Thank god 

Monday (3/18):

We met on Monday for our very last dress rehearsal before the performance.  We worked in the motion capture lab from 2pm to 7:15pm, putting Cindy in the suit and running every single system to make sure they were all working.  We made the horrific discovery that our free trial of the software we were using to get information from the kinect sensors expired Sunday, and the computer wouldn't allow us to download another free trial.  We ended up having to roll a second computer into the room and jerryrig a weird back-and-forth between the two.  Yash and Lara handled setting that up, and it took probably four hours to work out.  God bless them and their extremely hard work.  I would highly recommend checking out their blogs to see how they did that. FINALLY we were able to get the whole thing running and actually test the system.  Thank god it worked.  We had a final all-hands-on-deck meeting going over everything we needed for Tuesday, and then headed home.

Tuesday (3/19):

PREP: 

THE DAY OF OUR FINAL PERFORMANCE!!!!!  I showed up to the lab at 2pm to help prep for our performance starting at 6pm.  I helped Lara and Yash set up equipment, then decorated the room with balloons while they got the systems running.  As safety coordinator, I went over all the possible cards with Cindy, making sure once again that they were all cleared with her and none of them made her uncomfortable.  We went over our hand signals and then got her dressed in the suit.  She showed me all of the spots on the suit where she had noticed tape rubbing or potentially peeling off, and we meticulously went over it and checked once again that all of the 12 inputs on the sensor were working.  I then had the fun job of face painting Cindy, Vivian, and Nick so they would match with our circus theme!  

So my jobs during prep were:

  • Move and set up equipment
  • Blow up balloons and decorate the room 
  • Write prompts on cards 
  • Review all prompts with Cindy
  • Dress Cindy 
  • Repair all broken tape connections on suit
  • Check all 12 sensor inputs to make sure they were receiving feedback
  • Face-paint performers  
  • Review safety with Cindy  

Cindy in costume and ready to begin.

THE PERFORMANCE:

The performance went really well!  It was different from the dress rehearsal in several ways and I'm not sure if I liked it better or worse.  It was weird.  But it went smoothly and that was all that mattered!

The main thing that set this performance apart was that fewer people seemed unwilling to touch Cindy, and I don't know how to feel about that or explain it.  We had larger groups come in this time and thus people had more of an opportunity to watch others go first before their own turn, and I think that made some people more comfortable because they'd already seen how the experience would go.  We still got a lot of people being hesitant to touch Cindy, particularly anywhere other than her arms, but they seemed much more willing than in the dress rehearsal.  I enjoyed that many people still whispered "Sorry, sorry" to Cindy as they were touching her; that made me feel good.  

Anuraj lifting Cindy's leg after considerable encouragement

Another difference this time was that we rearranged the audience area to be a bunch of seat directly opposite the screen, with Nick standing near the screen and repeatedly trying to direct their attention to the screen and the digital puppet instead of to Cindy.  I didn't like this change or the effects of it very much.  I feel like the screen in general really detracts from the intimate performance element, but that's just my personal opinion.  At least hearing Paul's feedback, I finally understood what he wanted: he envisioned a version of the project where the moment of cognitive dissonance occurs after the audience member has already gotten involved in moving Cindy around and has become desensitized to manipulating her, and then she talks or something and they go "oh no, I can't believe I forgot she's a person".  The way I picture the ideal performance, I want the moment of cognitive dissonance to occur at the exact moment the audience member enters the room and sees that the puppet is a person for the first time.  I think it's going to be way less effective if we make it into a game where we try to distract audience members and get them comfortable moving Cindy around.  I want them to be super uncomfortable the whole time.  Feedback from several of our audience members affirmed that our performance was "weird", "uncomfortable" and "not something I would want to do again".  I'm very fascinated by that and think we should dig into that as much as possible.  

Varun manning the prompt table

Regardless, the performance went well!  We still got good reactions and learned a lot so we can continue to reformat  for future performances.  I'm proud of what we did!

 

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