With the advent of new streaming services, expanding cinema chains, and younger generations moving out of rural areas, the Connecting Cinemas consortium - 5 independent rural cinemas - is looking for ways to redefine themselves as local cultural hubs to connect and re-engage the younger audience.
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).
We performed semi-structured interviews with both cinema staff and the younger cinema audience. Having had previous experience in research, I drafter de research plan, crafted the interview protocol and interview questions for all the team to use.
In order to help my team have a better understanding of the data gathered I synthesized the data collected into sticky notes and clustered it into an Affinity Diagram. From that process we crafted our main insights:
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you'd like to build this project on your end, you can find the instructions in my GitLab: https://gitlab.com/bl39/CineCube
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.
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