The Exhibition
The end of year exhibition is a tradition which I myself started last year with my interactive 'weather room'. This year, once again, I was looking forward to the experience. It's always interesting presenting your project to those who have not seen your work develop over the semester - and who might not understand the concepts behind it. You have to find a way of getting everyone interested. The expo is attended by friends, family and a select group of industry experts. I was expecting it to be an amazing night filled with anon-stop flow of people and flooded by industry people - unfortunately, this wasn't the case.
Although there was a pretty decent amount of people there, as far as I could see most of the industry people who were invited did not arrive. It may have had something to do with the fact that my campus is in the middle of nowhere, or they just wern't interested in the projects listed - in any event, this immediately changed the scope of my assignment presentation. I had built the presentation for those who have a small amount of technical knowledge. I had to quickly re-tune it for the 'parents and friends' market, and I had to assume they knew very little if anything about programming at the way aAVis was built.
The Setup
aAVis was lucky enough to be set up on the projector screen in a room surrounded by 6 or so other groups. I had my desktop computer brought from home, and set myself up surrounded by speakers.
Most of the night I spent sat at the computer whipping up presets so people could see aAVis in action. Occasionally people came up and talked to me, so I went through a list of features and how it essentially worked. Though most of the time, people left me alone.
The Outcomes
Overall, the expo wasn't the night I was expecting it to be, but it wasn't a bad night either. It is always interesting to see peoples' perspective on projects they don't know, or completely understand. And it was also interesting seeing ex-students examine it and disucss the techinical side to things. There was a nice mix of casual users and developers, and I feel most people were impressed by what I had achieved.
The idea of having an exhibition at the end of the year is a very good one. I think it is important for developers to have something to aim for. Computer game developers aim for release dates, Artists wait for gallery openings and exhibitions. So it is nice for students to have something to look forward to at then end of the year. I believe having this 'light at the end of the tunnel' was an excellent learning experience and really aided me throughout development as I knew that It 'had to be good' because 'people will see it!'. If I could change anything about the way I presented at the exhibition, I would have loved to have some buisness cards, and a set of basic instructions on how to use the program. It would have been very interesting seeing the kinds of presets complete strangers make. However due to the complexity of the project, I'm not sure if people would understand the way it worked.
