Wizard of Oz
- Angelo
- Apr 3, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 15, 2020
For our final assignment we were introduced to Wizard of Oz prototyping, which in short means faking possible features that the end-product would have to test user response.
The assignment involved coming up with a concept that involved body movement as a way of controlling a game. My idea was to take the classic game of Pong and reinvent it by making the pallets hand-controlled. Moving your hand vertically in front of your webcam would move the pallet assigned to you accordingly, and the best part is that 2 players can go against each other. We also decided to add a seasonal touch, giving the situation we were in during the prototyping.
Creating the prototype was not that hard, as watching The Coding Train's tutorial helped me program the game in little over an hour, while testing it was even easier thanks to Microsoft Teams.
Evaluation and reflection
We decided to that for the test we would take one user, and I will be the one to go against him, so, while we were moving our hands up-and-down in front of our cameras, my partner, who played the wizard behind the scenes, was controlling the paddles with her keyboard, trying to create as real of an experience as possible.
Here is how one of the tests went :
The feedback from peers was very positive, telling us that they would love to challenge their friends to this reinvented version of Pong and the only improvement suggestions they could come with were to the aesthetics of the game.
When I first heard about Wizard of Oz prototypes I was a bit confused, but after looking more into it, and doing it myself I clearly understand that it's a resource-effective method to test ideas in the early stages of a project, and it can be quite fun too.
The source code and files can be found here:
Comments