How we Evaluated ambient devices

We invited three ICS Students and three Non-ICS Students into CSDL and held five demos for them. Each demo represented an action that the ambient orb or the Nabaztag bunny could perform. After every demo, we recorded the students' reactions and asked them a series of questions regarding the mood that was brought about by certain colors being displayed, etc.

Because we could not change the settings for the orb or bunny manually with our ambient server, we used the orbmanager developed by Professor Nickles to change the colors and animations of the orb and used a flash program developed by a Nabaztalk.com forums member(popoyl) to control the Nabaztag bunny.

Evaluation

Below is a list of the five demos for this evaluation.

Rabbit Ear Movements

• Presented different ear positions.

• Presented a series of colors (Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green)

• Made the bunny talk with different accents.

• Presented a series of colors.

• Presented a series of animations.

Rabbit Ear Movements

One member from the Non-ICS Students group thought that it was really hard to depict anything negative or positive with the ear movements. Another member thought that having the ear position forward made the bunny look cool and relaxed, so it depicted something positive, while the bunny with ears positioned towards the back made the bunny look like it was running frantically, which depicted something negative. The ears position upwards made the bunny look alert, but did not bring about anything positive or negative. It was the same with the ears pointed down. For the ICS Students, the general consensus was that both ears pointing up conveyed a positive response, while the ears pointing down, which showed sadness, conveyed something negative.

Rabbit Color Changes

For both groups, green was overall depicted as something good. It was seen as the green traffic light, which signifies "go." Red was depicted as something bad and blue and yellow were seen as neutral colors.

Rabbit Text To Speech

The general consensus of the Text-To-Speech feature was that it was too soft. Both groups felt that the volume needs to be louder in order to garner attention when making announcements.

Orb Color Changes

The colors brought about the same reaction as the colors presented with the Nabaztag bunny. The only difference was that this seemed more visible and brighter than the Nabaztag bunny.

Orb Animation Changes

Majority of the students felt that they could not even see some animations. Even the quick pulsing ones were too subtle for some.

Conclusion

We found some intriguing information while running the demos with the students. One interesting thing to note was their reactions of the colors presented. Overall, the color yellow was depicted as something neutral, while our team had seen yellow as something troubling. Besides yellow, the other colors shown brought about similar reactions with our group. Another interesting thing to note was that the non-ICS students did not really see anything negative with the rabbit ears pointed down or positive with the rabbits pointed up. One of the ICS Students made one last point that as long as the team knows exactly what the actions meant, then it should not matter what each color represented.