Motion Presenter is a Wizard of Oz prototype, which seems to work, but actually is faked. My team designed this prototype that aimed to make our participants believe we made a functional product. However, one of our team members, aka the wizard, was controlling the effect.
Design
Motion Presenter is a motion capture device that recognizes presenter’s gesture and control the slides accordingly. The goal of this design is to give presenter the freedom to walk around and control the slides without going back to the computer or holding a controller.
Prototype
There are four members in my team:
- Facilitator: communicates with participants, making sure they follow our protocol;
- Camera man (me): films the testing session and edits the video demo;
- Note taker: takes notes of the testing session and asks follow up questions after each testing;
- Wizard: controls the slides.
The way we built this prototype is by remote connecting one laptop to the classroom computer. The specific steps are the following:
- Find an empty classroom and take it;
- Download a remote control App, TeamViewer, on the classroom computer;
- Download TeamViewer on our laptop;
- Download the sample Power Point slides on the classroom computer and play it;
- Set up the remote control.
After the initial set up, our wizard could use her laptop to control the classroom computer and play the slides. We then invited three participants to the classroom for the testing. We told them that we had a motion sensor installed on the classroom projector so they could use their gesture to control the slides. When introducing our team, the facilitator told them the wizard was just a note taker. The facilitator also taught participants what gestures they could use, then started the testing.
We designed three scenarios for participants to complete:
- Switch slides: go to the next slide and go back to the previous slide;
- Video control: pause/resume video, fast forward/go back, volume up/down;
- Canvas: draw/erase.
Feedback
After going through three scenarios with our sample slides, we revealed the truth to our participants. One participant was completely fooled by us and really shocked when we told her that she was not controlling the slides. Another participant said she had doubts at the beginning because she did not believe we actually installed a sensor on the projector. The last participant did not believe us at all so she had no response when we told her the fact but said “Yeah I know”
Overall, this prototype was very successful. All three participants had no problem understanding and performing the first set of gesture. But for the second set of gesture, one participant was confused about video forward with slide forward, because they all required hand gesture. Another participant frequently adjusted the video volume, so the device (the wizard) was not able to capture her motion in time, thus led to unexpected volume jump. As for the third set of gesture, two participants found it hard to control the drawing speed, and the actual lines were not appearing at the locations they drew. This was more like a technical challenge, and the “finger on canvas for drawing and fist bottom on canvas for erasing” was easy to understand for them.
Future Improvements
- Adding a “viewing all slides” and a “jumping to certain slide” function to the gesture controlling system;
- Providing better feedback (or conformation) after a controlling gesture is performed;
- It would be nice to let users design their own controlling gestures.
We think using gesture control to do presentation is a reasonable and practical solution, and we look forward for an opportunity to further develop this system in the future.