Snap Creative Challenge' 21
MystARy
Encouraging Social Interaction Among Strangers
MY ROLE
UX Research
Storywriting
Formative Assessment
Contextual Inquiry
Qualitative Research
Wireframe Designing
AR Development (Lens Studio)
TEAM SIZE
4
VISION
People mindlessly scrolling on their phones is a common sight. Leveraging Augmented Reality we aim to bring together strangers on the street to solve a mystery together. Our proposed experience aims to encourage people to live in the moment and have fun together while fostering social interactions with others by bursting the digital bubbles formed by our devices. This experience brings together unacquainted people and engages them with a gripping story. Each participant is assigned a character in the story. They navigate through the experience by choosing various prompts to create a story around their characters. They further explore the environment to search for clues and evidence, interacting with one another, to identify the murderer. Most importantly, controlling the narrative and having a common goal to catch a murderer allows these people who might have not met before to have fun together.
AR enables us to present contextual cues to the participants of the experience. The cues would be based on the (a) character the participants are playing; (b) location; and (c) evidence/clues which will help them solve the mystery. AR also enhances the experience by adding assets into the environment which support the narrative of a murder mystery.
PROPOSED OUTCOME
We propose to build a functioning prototype that grabs the attention of people on the street and engages them in a murder mystery where the participants play characters of suspects trying to clear their names of false murder accusations. We hope to integrate the following into our AR system.
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Grab people's attention (e.g., Blood Footprints leading to the location).
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Character Bio Cards to set the backstory of the suspect characters.
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Location Tags which lead the participants from different locations to uncover the mystery.
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Prompt Cards for Story Progression.
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Clues/Evidence which participants will use to get an understanding.
Our novelty lies in gathering the attention of unacquainted people and engaging them in a co-located experience towards a common goal of solving a mystery.
Our core contribution lies in weaving a mystery story into a typical day of unknown participants, facilitated by AR. Bringing people together who may not know each other and are completely oblivious to their surroundings. Making them a part of an experience together where they actively decide the course of the experience and also the story. With the experience, we hope to create conversations by -
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Giving a common theme to talk about
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Inducing discussion on their logical deductions, claims and use of imagination
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Creating and sharing alibi’s/reasons not to vote/vote for people
FINAL VIDEO
OUR EXPLORATION
We started off by exploring how to design a murder mystery. Such an experience would typically have a storyline, characters including a murderer, and suspects who in an attempt to clear out their name search for the killer. Broadly, we wanted to work on a non-linear storyline. Such an experience would create an environment where participants would have to elicit information from each other, promoting conversation. Since our experience leveraged AR, it can contribute to our experience by helping in collaboration, anchoring clues and objects to physical spaces and promoting participants to move together in a given space to explore, and anchoring character cards to players as a means of initiating conversation through the game. AR also enhances a regular murder mystery by adding effects, like footprints on the ground, to make the experience more captivating.
Gathering Attention
To explore our domain in-depth, we focussed on the two subparts of our problem individually, starting with how to gather the attention of strangers to engage for such an experience. This was an important question to ask to understand the motivation behind engagement in experiences. Once we understood what would push people to be a part of an experience involving strangers, we would be able to leverage these in our experience.
We started by thinking about experiences we see around ourselves that require attention gath- ering. This immediately made us think of street performances. Street performers have unique and quirky ways of gathering the attention of people in public spaces. Often, they are able to gather a huge crowd for their performances. This prompted us to think of spaces where our experience would be situated. Depending on the locations and norms of these spaces, we would be able to move towards ideating ways of gathering attention.
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As possible spaces where we could gather the attention of strangers, we came up with the following-
• Staircase: Height of stairs
• Footpath: Tiles
• Corridor: shadows, using the element of surprise
• Park/Field: Trees Speaking
• Lift: Grabbing attention to take to a particular floor
• Cafe/Restaurant: Bill/Menu
• Public Transport
• Parking
• Generic: Character, Footsteps/following-Leading, Artwork/ Banner
Rather than focussing mainly on public places, we focussed on elements of places that exist in many locations, like footpaths, staircases, and corridors. These gave us freedom of exploration and was less restrictive during ideation. We aimed to use audio, visual, and haptic clues to gather attention in these spaces. We brainstormed different ways in which we could gather attention in many of these spaces.
Element of surprise: Flying newspapers to catch attention of players, introduced as concepts in many movie scenes​
Seeking for help to catch attention
Highlighting footpath tiles to simulate a game to gather attention
To understand how AR can assist in gathering attention, we also prototyped small interactions with effects on Lens Studio that aim to catch attention.
Using AR to interact with real life objects: Using lift buttons and hands to anchor AR interactions
An added layer of brainstorming was conducted to extend attention gathering to activities. These are the activities that we explored that would assist in catching the attention of strangers. In addition to these, we also added context to the physical spaces identified earlier by listing down various locations where our proposed activities can help gather attention. We identified the following-
We again attempted to use these activities and places to design ways of gathering attention.
Dancing: Virtual prompts to engage the audience in a street dance experience, makes the audience feel more involved in the performance
A guided tour where a small group of tourists individually explore a location and then collaborate to unravel the entire history of the location
Virtual use of age-old street games as a source of engagement
Since our team was mentored by Dr Andres Monroy-Hernandez, a principal research scientist at Snap Inc., our progress was regularly discussed with him in meetings. Our future directions were decided after discussions and suggestions. At this point, everyone was more inclined to explore only the colocated experience rather than gathering attention. Our take away from ideating around gathering attention was the promise that art forms like dance and street games, like marbles, held in such an experience. Dance is being reintroduced in different ways through Instagram reels and Tiktok. Street games on the other hand are evergreen and are reminiscent of our childhood, making them a common point of interaction for all. We held on to these two as we ventured into the colocated experience.
Formative Study
To understand what it takes to engage strangers in a fun experience together and how current co-located experiences mediate interactions and conversations between strangers, we conducted a formative study using three sample experiences. For our study, we recruited three groups of participants, all university students. To ensure participants did not know each other, 2-3 students were approached from different tables in the cafeteria and the library of our college.
We chose three experiences for our study-
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A Snap lens Faceoff required a single device to be passed around
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Place Invaders game, as it was a very intensive AR game
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The Cube AR game, as it was a more social AR game
These helped us cover a broad spectrum of colocated AR experiences.
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The first experience was a lens on Snapchat called ‘Faceoff’. The lens was a multiplayer experience where users were given directions to move their heads in certain directions using arrows on the screen. If they followed the instruction correctly, they were prompted to pass the phone to the next person. We observed that more than actually playing the game correctly, it was the hiccups and wrong plays that made interaction fun. Due to an outgoing participant, ice-breaking was easier. Since the experience engaged users at different times, they were able to focus on each other. A key takeaway that we had was to ensure multiple experiences do not overlap in order to ensure maximum interaction and conversation.
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The second experience was a collaborative AR game in iOS called Place Invaders. The multi- player game lets players compete with the aliens by shooting them using their guns. We observed that participants playing the game needed explicit prompts to interact and barely interacted on their own. On interacting with a participant after the experience, they stated that they “wanted to interact, but the game was so demanding that I was focussed on the game only”. Both par- ticipants also felt the experiences were unrelated to each other. They were both engrossed in their own experiences that they did not understand they were a part of the same game. This again highlighted the importance of disjoint experiences where participants can interact. One of the participants also observed the AR features of the game and complimented them, however felt that they were unable to understand the game elements.
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In the third experience, we aimed to have an ice-breaking session between the two participants and then ask them to play a game. We used the Snap Lens “Faceoff” and a multiplayer game on iOS called The Cube AR. The Cube AR is a 3D version of the famous game tic-tac-toe. The player with the maximum number of cubes together wins the game. We observed that in spite of having an ice-breaking session through the AR lens, which engaged the participants together, they did not prefer to interact with each other during the game. The two participants were stuck at a time on how to proceed further in the game, still they did not choose to interact and learn together. The game did not provide any prompt for them to interact in a shared social experience.
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Overall, we learnt that explicit prompts to interact in fact do lead to increased interaction. Physical interactions added more quality to the experience as compared to on-screen interactions since increased physical interaction led to more meaningful conversations and better icebreaking. We observed that awkwardness could be leveraged to make experiences more fun and interactive. Instead of minimizing awkwardness, we can capitalize on it to make strangers laugh at a situa- tion. Moreover, spreading content over a period of time allows users to explore the experience in their own time and not rush through it. It also leaves more time for participants to interact.
Conclusion
Learnings from our formative study, coupled with our literature review, motivated us to explore Murder Mystery as our experience. Though we had branched out several times, we always came back to this experience since it checked all our boxes. It is an engaging game with elements of mystery, which in turn piques the interest of participants. With different roles and a storyline, it encourages communication among participants while looking for clues. Moreover, it also utilizes asymmetry through the role-based game. Asymmetry can also be highlighted through tweaks in the game like different abilities given to different participants. Overall, Murder Mystery was the perfect colocated experience for us to explore.
The use of AR brings our experience a step ahead of a regular Murder Mystery game. AR allows us to include asymmetry in the game, for example, by giving different clues. The inherent quality of AR to provide different experiences to players while being a part of the same game makes it not only very attractive but also vital for our experience.
RESEARCH QUESTION
To formulate our research question, we first tried to precisely define how we could include asymmetry in our murder mystery. Since the game involves different roles, asymmetry can be included in the form of player capabilities. Due to roles, players would have different objectives. For example, the murderer would try to avoid being identified. Roles would also allow players to have access to different information. For example, the victim’s neighbour and brother would have different information on the series of events that took place when the victim was murdered. Asymmetry introduced in these ways induces an interdependency among players. In essence, by exploring asymmetry in the experience through player capabilities, information, and objectives as described above, we explore player interdependence.
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This led us to formulate our research question-
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Exploring Player Interdependence in Virtual co-located experiences to enhance so- cial interactions between strangers
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where player interdependence is caused by asymmetry in:
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Player Capabilities
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Information
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Objectives
OUR STUDY
Study Procedure
We aim to conduct an exploratory study that investigates the interaction between players and their experience related to the dif- ferent game patterns implemented in our game. We would keep the player interdependence factors, player capabilities, information and objectives to be asymmetrical. However they would be dependent interactions as well which would include player experience, social presence, learning about each other and playfulness. We would create three different experiences, and compare them based on the dimensions of symmetry and asymmetry game play. For testing the information, first each individual in the murder mystery would be provided with different information. For the second time, everyone wil be given the same information to complete a designated task. The results from the two different tests will help compare symmetry and asymmetry of information. Similar process would be followed for the other two factors as well.
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After every round in the game, we would wish to circulate a questionnaire to examine the experience of each player and compare their experiences with other strangers playing the game. We would use three existing questionnaires which have been used by HCI researchers before including PENS, SPGQ and PLEXQ. These questionnaires would have options in the form of Likert scale from 1 to 5, 1 being least likely and 5 being most likely. The PENS stand for Player Experience of Need Satisfaction, and comprises of questions related to the experience of the player in context of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The SPGQ stands for Social Presence in Gaming Questionnaire, which is used to take into account social presence on the basis of empathy, negative feelings, and behavioral engagement. PLEXQ refers to Playful Experience Questionnaire that measures playfulness and immersion of a game. We also aim to ask custom based questions which would query about the trust of co-players, sympathy on them and their competence.
Experience Design
We came across a framework by Lundgren et al. to design experiences for colocated inter- action. The framework was an appropriate choice for us to use to design our experience since it allowed us to choose relevant categories to focus on from a variety of parameters to tailor our murder mystery. The framework consisted of four main design perspectives, namely Social, Tech- nological, Spatial and Temporal, and associated various properties and states with each. Using various design perspectives and properties associated with them, we would be able to form a colocated experience of our choice. The selection for these would be dependent on our final goals.
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With murder mystery and our aim to explore player interdependence in mind, we started with shortlisting which design perspectives, properties, and states to focus on. A benefit of using the framework was that various states under different properties were interrelated, which made it easier for us to avoid overlaps and select 5 (4-6 suggested) properties and their states.
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The following design perspectives, properties, and states were chosen-
Using these chosen parameters, we will design our three experiences that aim to explore player interdependence and compare experiences with symmetry and asymmetry.
LEARNINGS
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Player Interdependence and Explicit prompts tend to encourage interactions
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Physical Interactions should be preferred to on-screen interactions
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Instead of minimising awkwardness, we can capitalized on it to make strangers laugh at a situation
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Spread content over a period of time, leave time for strangers to interact. Turn Based experiences can be a direction for exploration.