During the Winter 2018 quarter, the Oscillations Knight Lab team was tasked in exploring the question: what constitutes an engaging live movement arts performance for audiences? Oscillations’ Chief Technology Officer, Ilya Fomin, told the team at quarter’s start that the startup aims to create performing arts experiences that are “better than reality.” In response, our team spent the quarter seeking to understand what is reality with qualitative research. Three members of the team interviewed more than 20 audience members about their experiences watching performances and what elements of the performance captivated them most. Through this broad exploration, our team learned the key factors that positively and negatively influence an audience member’s experience, so we can offer the Oscillations team insights into how to make their virtual reality experiences the most captivating for viewers and “better than reality.”
The following document details our research and the takeaways we hope to further research in the following quarter.
The Process
After identifying user research as a core component of the team’s objectives this quarter, three members started broadly interviewing performers and audience members, including those who attended performances at the Joffrey, Ballet, Steppenwolf Theatre Company and The Pentagon Theater. We also interviewed Billy Siegenfeld, a Northwestern University Professor of Dance, who offered his academic opinion on audience experience from the perspectives of both a dancer and professor.
After some initial interviews, we developed an interview guide, which can be seen below. This guide addresses the familiarity of our interviewee with the movement arts, their perspective of what constitutes an engaging live performance and how that is different from a 2D experience. We also prompted them to discuss their experience seeing movement arts performances in the presence of others and whether they thought virtual reality could fill any holes in how they experienced dance. Through our interviews, we prompted interviewees to define their language, seeing as most mentioned there is an “energy” in the room when they are in a live performance. We sought to really understand those terms and get beneath the surface to evaluate this language.
After conducting each interview, the interviewer transcribed their notes and discussed with the team what they believed was most insightful from their conversation. We also created a Note.ly board, which can be seen below, that is organized by familiarity level and highlights the most key points and quotes from our interviewees. In addition to this Note.ly board, Joo-Young, Ben and Harriet conducted two insights brainstorm sessions that helped define key insights going forward into the next quarter.
In all, we interviewed more than 25 performers and audience members this quarter. While we concluded this quarter’s user research was quite comprehensive, we intend to take our targeted insights from this broad research and conduct a deep dive on one or two of them next quarter.
Insights
The team identified five key takeaways about audience engagement during a live movement arts performances. We believe these five insights highlight the elements on a deeper level that engage audiences during a performance and gives us a better understanding of how audience perceive the movement arts live.
Our insights are the following:
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Next Steps
With these five insights identified, the Oscillations team next quarter will decide which one (or two) are important to keep investigating and are essential to understand for immersive performing arts experiences.
Once we identify these insights, we are going to develop another research plan and conduct more intensive user interviews with standardized unpack guides that will help us dissect the insights further and see if there is an opportunity area Oscillations can fill with their product. This dissection will follow a formal design thinking process.
Our research this quarter was primarily qualitative. Next quarter, we are hopeful to use these qualitative finding to help our team develop a quantitative survey that can be offered to audience members experiencing live and virtual reality experiences. We feel a strong balance of qualitative and quantitative research will allow us to give Oscillations robust insights that are applicable to developing their product.
We have hypothesized that for virtual reality to be the most engaging, it will have to move beyond simply replicating a live performance or 2D video experience. It will have to exist as its own medium and fill a hole that audience members are feeling about how they can currently experience the movement arts. From our initial research, we hypothesize that virtual reality will have to offer audience members super-real experiences that aren’t possible in live or 2D performances. Yet, this is hypothesis we have to further investigate before making any conclusions.
With this all said, we will have to confer with our new teammates in April, so we can include their thoughts in this process and go forward from there. Yet, in all, we feel the winter quarter gave the Oscillations team a strong foundation of audience experience knowledge that will help identify opportunity areas and key metrics to measure in the future.
Audiences and performers are separated in time but not in space.
