We showed our applications during the week to invited groups and at the Walker's regular "After Hours" Event on Friday night.

Here I am, caught my the Walker's webcam, setting up the Idesk2 - the large road case in the corner.

This was the first beta-testing of the completed "The Thing Growing" story - or at least my first draft of that story. Previously I had shown Acts1 and 2, where the user meets the Thing and is cajoled and threatened into dancing with it. Here I added Act3, where the the user is confronted with the Thing's four cousins who are disgusted at the fraternization between Thing and User.

Although we did not have a networked set-up at the Walker, the Thing was not fully autonomous and hints about how well the user was dancing were fed to it from the keyboard.

The entire experience lasts 10-15 minutes and it was interesting to watch how people related to the virtual environment. Probably about 15 - 20 went through the whole interactive experience during this week, (with an additional 100 odd as passive viewers.) The interactive users seemed to fall into two camps. Those who wouldn't dance whatever happened and those who were endlessly obediant.

The not dancing issue was sometimes an interface one - when the user didn't understand they were required to move their actual physical bodies. So I need to make this clearer. However, sometimes people were just stubborn - and it was always women who utterly refused to dance.

It also seems that the middle portion - where the cousins capture the Thing and the user and put the Thing on trial for its crime of fraternizing with a human is a bit too long. However, everyone seemed liberated at the moment they got to run around and kill the four cousins- very familiar territory!

All but 2 people had no qualms about killing the Thing - so I want to work on increasing people's squeemishness.