TouchPlanet

Project Team Simon Tiede Jenny Gabel Maike Kröger Maria Urtecho-Lopez Joan Knothe

Supervision Paul Lubos Prof. Dr. Frank Steinicke Kenan Bromann (Planetarium)

Goal

Goal of this project was it to develop a Solar System with the multitouchtable "interactive SPAtial SurfaCE (iSPACE)" in cooperation with the Planetarium Hamburg. We were focussing on a familiar userinterface and an appealing design. Due to these facts we decided to use gestures, that are known from smartphones and tablets.

The Planetarium is planning to use our project and exhibit it in their lobby after their rebuilding in late 2015. Therefor we had a clear specification for our target group. Our purchaser wanted us to create TouchPlanet mainly for children but it should also be attractive to other groups. Particular goals were formed during the process of work.

Progress

First we started making PACT-Analyses, scenarios and personas. After we created a lot of sketches, we tried to connect wishes and ideas from the Planetarium and also these from the HCI work group.

We worked with Unity, a cross-platform game creation system including a game engine. We also had to deal with touchinput in Unity, therfore we decided to work with TouchScript - a multitouch framework for Unity3D. Due to TouchScript we were able to code gestures and handle complex interactions between gestures. During the course of the project we often collected feedback from our supervisors and from time to time from the Planetarium.

There were no particular responsibilities for each group member, we worked together in smaller groups or alone for a limited time and worked off our ToDos. We had to do a lot of fine work to satisfy both wishes and ideas from the Planetarium as well as those from our work group. Also it was important for us to pay attention to the developing process in order to provide a programm that can be expanded. We created a scene in which all planets from our solar system are included. It is an attractive visualization of rotating planets and the sun. The user is able to navigate via touch in the system.

In the late process of our work we started letting people test TouchPlanet to make it more userfriendly and fix bugs we didn't see before. The feedback gave us a considerably overview how our project appears to all age groups. And it was a nice feeling for us, that mostly all try persons thought TouchPlanet is a great project.