Context

Connecting Cinemas is a project initiated by the Neue Kammerspiele cinema& Public Art Lab Berlin and funded by the Creative Europe MEDIA programme of the European Commission. Their aim is to bring the idea of “European cinemas a step further by connecting the audiences and cinemas in rural regions Europe wide".

The consortium includes 5 cinemas around Europe: Amza Pellea (Romania), Cinema Star (Greece), Fortress of Šibenik (Croatia), Kino Centras Garsas (Lithuania) and Neue Kammerspiele (Germany).

Ideating & concepting

Ideation

In order to narrow down our scope before ideating, I led a workshop to frame our design challenge using Design Kit's Framework. Then, during our ideations session we sketched a variety of ideas, to name a few:

• Interactive screen right outside the cinema hall projecting what people draw/write onto the cinema’s wall;
  
• An AR cinema exhibition inside the cinema;
•  Expanding the cinema experience using a headset and involving more senses;

New concepts & user journey

From that moment, I decided to take individual time to think about the concepts while using our insights as design considerations for the concept. I decided to draft the current user journey of going to one of these rural/independent cinemas as a visual aid.

Thinking about the cinema space and the journey of movie-goers when heading to the cinema hall, I realized that there is an important moment between the time one enters the cinema hall and the time the movie starts. In megaplexes or mainstream cinemas, this moment is typically filled with advertisement whereas in an independent cinema it's usually not. I thought of this 'dead' moment as an opportunity to leverage.
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Parallelly, knowing that audio remains as a secondary supporting role in HCI and that it's a vehicle to creating shared experiences, I decided to further explore the use of music in our project. I thought of the 'dead' moment as an opportunity to leverage with the use of a physical object that allows to create music collaboratively.

Two other concepts were crafted by my colleagues:

• Confessions Box: a human-size box, similar to photobooths, where movie-goers can get in and share confessions related to the cinema and movies. These confessions would then be displayed within the cinema itself and within the partners cinemas’ space.
  
• Filters Screen: a human-size double- sided screen with filters. People that interact from one side will see the people that inreact from the other side in an animated manner.

Prototyping

Cube affordances

The idea of using cubes as the physical component of CineCube seemed natural at first. We thought that cubes are used in different interactive systems, like dice or the Rubik’s Cube. Upon doing some desk research, I found the affordances cube-based objects, and confirmed that using cubes as the physical component of the design was appropriate. More specifically, shaking a cube is usually associated with the object having an audio property.

IoT design & MVP

Being a tech enthusiast though I didn't know how to code, I decided to take the lead on all things tech. While I hadn't worked on IoT (and programming for that matter) prior to this project, I decided to start off by reading and documenting the possible hardware that we could use to achieve our goal: have each cube trigger a channel of a song.

I initially used the MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol being a lightweight and one of the main protocols used for IoT. However, it soon proved to be problematic as it required a server (known as broker) to host the data sent by the cube, before it is sent to the computer - meaning  that the time between moving the cube and triggering the sound would be higher than a couple of seconds. I then decided to use the Open Sound Control (OSC) as it allows the communication between computers, audio devices and electronic instruments -  it particularly eased the connection between the accelerometer's signals and the Digital Audio Workstation.
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If you'd like to build this project on your end, you can find the instructions in my GitLab: https://gitlab.com/bl39/CineCube

Conclusion

With CineCube, we aimed at creating a 'shared choreography' within the cinema hall, where every movie goer would individually play with the cube, but where everyone would collectively enjoy the music created. Going back to the insights, this concept proves to be a shared experience that brings this "community of strangers" together and connects every movie goer with each other, and the local cinema, via a collaborative and playful experience.

Our design process and solution have been added in the Civic Interaction Design research group guide for the Connecting Cinemas Consortium. You can check out our video here: https://youtu.be/uUMeLC5jyFY.