Lobby ONE

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Inspiration

Start with why

– Simon Sinek

Aalto University is an amazing endeavor. It brings business, technology and design together to the iconic Otaniemi campus to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and new innovative ideas. However, the physical buildings force people apart from each other, especially during the academic year in cold Finnish winter.

Kalle, a 1st year business student feels this in his bones. In the middle of the former engineer village, he is in a foreign territory. On the other hand, he wants to get to know some engineers and designers – after all, that's why he came to Aalto. Everyone talks about networking, but how does it actually happen? Is there something else to the university besides lectures and essays?

The solution lies in the most underrated, unnoticed space of university buildings – lobbies. There are dozens of such transitional spaces in the campus. Lots of people walk through them between lectures but few remain to spend time there. We are transforming lobbies into points of interaction between different social groups; from spaces to places. Lobbies become meaningful for people who have a sense of ownership of them. The huge, ongoing paradigm shift in academic and working life emphasizes lifelong learning through interactions and meeting people from various fields. This is where our solution, Lobby ONE contributes.

What it does

Lobby ONE connects people with installation projectors, Kinect cameras and augmented reality. Each lobby has a life-size real-time video stream connection to another lobby. There is a large projected surface on the wall. It's like a window to a parallel space: you can see them and they can see you. And the lobby you see in the picture changes every now and then. In this way, we digitally merge separate spaces into one – Lobby ONE.

Lobby ONE encourages interaction between students in many ways. First you probably just wave. But then someone can throw a snowball at you! You can also draw with your hand to the air, or just write or draw your thoughts on a piece of paper and show it to the other side. The system can also suggest sudden social activities, for example a virtual snowball fight or a 60 second contest on which side gathers more smiling faces to the same picture. If you want to know more about the world on the other side, you can scan a QR code with your Aalto Space app. That allows you to see the location of the other screen on a map and send messages on the screen. Through Lobby ONE you can also peek into pre-party cocktail events in other buildings.

The value of these features for people like Kalle is threefold:

Lobby One creates awareness: It allows him to see and feel being in new places, around new people in the campus. HE doesn’t need to do anything.
By simple social activities, Kalle can connect with people on the other side together with students he knows on this side.
If Kalle is brave enough, he can even interact with people on the other side on a personal level, making friends!

How we built it

Our team combines experience in interior design, mathematics and system analysis, anthropology, and service design. This can be seen in the methods we used in this design process:

Interviews. Kalle's story is inspired by interviews we conducted in Otaniemi campus area, as well as our team members' own experiences while studying there.
Observing the space, bodystorming. The design brief included a specific site, the lobby area of U-wing in the bachelor building in Aalto Otaniemi campus. We spent time there making observations about the space, it's layout and furniture. The seeds of the idea for Lobby ONE were planted during one of those silent observation sessions.
Prototyping. We prototyped the user experience by simulating the lobby-to-lobby interaction with a glass wall, trying to communicate with each other through the glass. Then we took on a huge, existing screen and placed a camera in front of it. We really wanted to sense in our bodies how it would feel to interact with people on the other side of the screen. We were performing the interactions on video to see what feels natural and what doesn't. Resulting video demo is attached to this project.
Ideation, pivoting. We used several hours tackling the issue of disconnected spaces and students within those spaces. Building on top of each others' ideas, having a Round Robin exercise and boldly killing our darlings, Lobby ONE is where we finally landed.
Sketching, photography, videography, image edit. Affinity Photo, After Effects, Photoshop, DSLR, CAD...

Challenges we ran into

It was by no means an easy ride. For example, following questions ensued:

How to encourage interaction, especially among shy people? (User is already interacting with the space even when he's not interacting with people. There is a sense of combined spaces. So the shy ones get value even though they wouldn't dare to interact alone. Also, the users who are more active gradually draw the shy people to participate in the interaction.)
Why do we prefer interactions through virtual connection points rather than real life encounters? (This is an easy way for the students to familiarize with the different spaces of the campus area.)
Unpredictability: it is not possible to to know how much and in what ways people will start interacting. The technology leaves lot of possibilities and space for unplanned interactions. The users will in the end define how Lobby ONE is used. (This is what makes Lobby ONE interesting – it's never complete!)
How to maintain people’s privacy? The places for projected surfaces are selected so that it is possible to walk past them from a distance where you remain relatively unrecognized. Also, the stream is not recorded nor broadcasted to public Internet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

By testing several prototypes of possible interactions we were able to select the best ones. We also realised the limitations of technology without a line of code.
We were able to pull off the demo video in such a short time span.
We used existing infrastructure for the solution: Kinect, and Aalto Space app. Also when prototyping, we used existing infrastructure like glass walls, mirrors, screens etc. in a creative way to save resources and time.

What we learned

Few people are extrovert enough to start an interaction.
There is a sense of awkwardness in one-way streaming – it needs to be both ways.
UI-wise, large projected screen with Kinect with a display to the "other side" is very tricky: "traditional" kinect/wii style games show the player, but in our case reacting to the screen content is guesswork. Where or how to show the selfie? For now we decided not to show it at all. There is a possibility to assign a cursor for every user's hand so that they are able to control what's happening on the screen.

What's next for Lobby One

Next we'd like to install a functional prototype in two lobbies within Aalto campus to see what users really do with it. Based on the use we can think of further development.

As the international broadband connections get better, we are able to stream real-time high quality connection to other universities around Finland, the Nordics, and finally throughout the world. Then you, together with Kalle, can take a peek at the worldwide academic network by just entering your good old, familiar lobby.