Opera Display.

An opera company wants to draw a broader audience and turn newcomers into recurring, passionate patrons. Design a companion screen experience to accompany an opera performance. Consider using either the mobile devices in audience pockets or a tablet built into every armrest.

My Submission:

I chose to approach this project as a tablet built into each armrest to allow all opera visitors to enhance their visit.

Research

I began with researching opera attendance to come up with who is attending and who isn’t. The NEA did a comprehensive report on arts attendance in 2002.

The numbers might be altered by the economic situation of the last decade. From the research 25% of opera goers are under 35, the majority are higher income, highly educated and live in the suburbs.

I looked into how some of the operas are represented online as well as technology that is being used inside the opera houses to get an idea of the experience when attending the opera.

The subtitles that were available to users were in various states of visibility depending on where the audience member sat in the opera house. The most successful solution for most of the audience members was at a Turkish Opera House that placed subtitles on the back of seats at the stage line so that audience members could read while watching the action on the stage.

With this in mind, I derived a persona that might fit a likely person that the opera house would like to reach out to.

 

Persona

Name: Rob
Age: 30
Education: College BA History
Income: 50,000

Lives in the City.
Already likes theater and musicals. Is curious about Opera.

Knows a little bit about the show he’s seeing today at a matinee.

Technical Considerations:
It was important that the screen was not disruptive to other audience members. The brightness is auto adjusted down for when the show begins but has some degrees of brightness that can be modified to help viewers see the subtitles and content.
The amount of user manipulation is reduced when in “Stage” mode to allow the user to focus on the stage while enhancing the visit.

Features

• Subtitles
• Enhanced Subtitles
• Cast Pages
• Historical Information
• Interactive Storyline
• Other Productions
• Character Relationships
• Behind The Scenes Production Journal
• Curtain Call/Intermission Countdown
• Intermission/Stage Mode
• Virtual Curtain call

Enhanced Subtitles: Subtitles that are viewable alongside additional content that the user can pull up to place the story into context, such as the Character Relationship Module the Historical Information module and the Storyline module.

Character Relationship Module: Character information that updates as the story progresses, as plot is revealed.

Show Historical Information: If there is mythological or a historical context for a scene or dialogue in the opera, this part is shown to the user.

Interactive Storyline: Like the character information, this module follows along with the storyline and the audience member can “rewind” to see relevant storyline information.

Wireframes

These are two wireframes of the Home screen and the Enhanced Subtitles.

Mockup

The Mockup that I wanted to show more detail for was the Enhanced Subtitles with Interactive Storyline. The goal for this screen is to not give off too much light during the show, but still provide more detail on the opera for the audience.