In this project, we explore ways to encourage intermediate skaters to learn and improve their skills by enhancing the skateboarding experience through rich audio feedback. During our user research, we found that there are two aspects of learning that we uncovered that is relevant for skating:

• Learning by doing :the practice of trial-and-error, repetition and “feel” (e.g., experiencing the equipment) and watching others.
• Play: the feelings of “adrenaline rush”, control, “intrinsic interest” and the creative process of performing tricks and exploiting affordances in their immediate environments

“MusiSkate” is essentially a skateboard that provides real-time musical feedback to different skating movements. This solution has the advantage of enhancing the user experience of skating through rich audio feedback. This concept closely adheres to the two aspects of learning mentioned above, in addition to the desired simplicity and expressiveness of the skateboarding culture.

Learning to skateboard is highly a experiential process: it is primarily facilitated through trial-and-error, repetition, “feel” (e.g., experiencing the equipment) and watching others (e.g., via YouTube, in person). However this process can be extremely time taking for some and even discouraging. Hence it is useful to think of ways to augment the skateboarding experience that can both encourage users to keep at it!

Research Question

• How to use encourage and facilitate intermediate skaters in the process of gaining more skills through play.

Proposed Solutions

Musiskate involves to modes of operation. One mode called "Tricks for Tracks" aims to provide a secondary goal for skaters to achieve, rather than just skating for the sake of trying and practicing. The secon mode called "Freestyle" aims to encourage the explorative side of skaters, so that they feel enouraged to try new tricks.

• Tricks for Tracks: The system guides users to help them create harmonizing music. The users need to perform a set of tricks consecutively in order to unlock hidden tracks of music. At the start of the challenge, the user is presented with a new choreography of skate-tricks and a musical master track is played. Lets say it is just the drum beats playing. As the user completes a trick, a new musical track is unlocked( lets say the guitar track) and added on top of the master track - this results in a richer sound. In this way, as the user proceeds through the choreography of tricks, further tracks are unlocked and added incrementally. Two consecutive failures, results in the re-locking of the last unlocked track.
• Freestyle: The movement of a skateboard is directly mapped to musical tones and frequencies. The twists, turns and swaying movements of the skateboard either generate corresponding musical movements or plays suitable soundclips. Thus the skater becomes his/her own conductor. The music acts as a rich feedback for the skater and has the potential of enriching the overall experience by elevating the skating sport to an artistic level.

Skateboarding is a unique sport such that it can defined as both a “social” and “loner” sport. It is social in the sense that groups of people can be seen to be skating together, and it is a loner sport because skaters dedicatedly practice tricks alone, and there are hardly ever any teams, coaches, officials or strict rules. Such a realization, added to our perceived “coolness” of the inherent showmanship of the activity directed us to look further into the highly physical culture of skateboarding.

Demographics
Intermediate Skaters with 1-5 years of experience

We visited prime skateboarder areas and observed the skaters in their natural environment to understand their process.We conducted semi-structured interviews in two well-known skateparks in and around Atlanta:

• Old Fourth Ward Skatepark (Atlanta, GA) for around 3-4 hours: a popular skatepark in Atlanta and is located around the beltline area.
• Swift Cantrell Park (Kennesaw, GA) for around 3-4 hours: this is one of the largest skateparks in USA and the largest skatepark in southern USA.

We also visited Stratosphere Skateboards, a popular skate shop to get a feel of what the skateboarders buy and what sort of gears they like.

We conducted a heuristic evaluation session with another team from our class consisting of Meeshu Agnihotri, David Chiang and Kara Kenna. The purpose of this is to internally evaluate our system for major usability issues before presenting it to the user for testing.

Details about the process and findings from the Heuristics evaluation are presented here and will be added to this webpage shortly.

We conducted an usability testing of our prototypes with three participants that we recruited. The purpose is to determine whether the prototype work with its intended users and to improve our design. This video demonstrates the testing process:

Research Questions

• What is the effect of audio feedback on the satisfaction of performing tricks on skateboards?
• What are the differences between our two prototypes in increasing the satisfaction of skating

Threshold of Acceptance

Prototype must be rated at least 4-5 on the Likert Scale to indicate an enhanced experience. Metrics: We used these metrics for measurement and evaluation:

• Enjoyment
• Appropriateness
• Usefulness
• Meeting of expectations
• Future use

Participants

We recruited skateboarders we met on the Georgia Tech campus to participate in our test. As undergraduate students, their age ranges all fell under 18-24. Two of them have 1-5 years of skateboarding experience, while one person has 6-10 years. All of them describe themselves as "intermediate" skaters.

Procedure

We scripted a few tasks for the participants to perform based on the tricks that our systems could detect. When the participants first arrived we showed them the proof of concept for MusiSkate. We then asked them a questionnaire and recorded their response. The next step was to ask the participants to perform the tasks we had scripted. Once that was done we asked them to fill the same questionnaire again but based on their experience with the system. The analysis of the pre and post task questionnaires helped us evaluate the prototype. The results of the evaluation are posted below.

Results

Freestyle
Tricks for Tracks Freestyle vs Tricks for Tracks
In general, the ratings for Freestyle remained constant for the pre-test and post-test questionnaires, implying that it met the users’ expectations of the system. One thing to note is it did not meet the threshold of 4 for usefulness, which shows that it was perceived to be more entertaining than useful.This can be due to the fact that the Freestyle interaction does not utilize a rewarding methodology but concentrates more on bringing out the creative side of the skater. This creative aspect will become more prominent when a larger number of tricks and movements can be mapped to widely varying sound-effects and also when the user gets the choice of choosing his/her own music track. For Tricks for Tracks, the usefulness and future use increased (median = 4) and decreased in appropriateness (median = 4), which can mean the users felt it exceeded their expectations but the music must be more customizable for their own purposes. Overall, the prototypes met our threshold of acceptance of 4-5 on the Likert Scale.

Major Issues Revealed

• Fragile prototypes - As we found out from the data, the performance of the prototypes mattered a lot in the users’ overall perception of the system. Our prototypes need to be made more robust so that they perform at a consistent level throughout every session of study.
• Transferring control to the users- both our prototypes need to be redesigned such that users have more control over the kinds of audio feedback they want to receive. Since the prototypes were hard-coded to use only one track of music and a specific set of sound effects, it does not give us a complete understanding of the usefulness of the system -individual preferences come into the picture and that reflects on the user responses.
• The entire study needed more users to get more consistent and reliable data.

Positive Takeaways

Despite the design issues, the system received an overall positive response from all the participants. They confirmed the fact that many skaters like to listen to music while skating and using the skateboard itself to generate sound and control music was perceived as a really “cool” and motivational idea. All the participants felt eager to try out the product in future and felt that audio feedback is highly suitable for skateboarding in general. Our design includes two different modes of interaction Freestyle and Tricks for Tracks, and both the modes of interaction seemed to address different aspects of the skateboarding experience- Freestyle can be used in earlier stages of skateboarding when skaters need to practice the same trick repeatedly whereas Tricks for Tracks can be useful once they have gained mastery over a set of tricks. Moreover while Freestyle was perceived as more fun and creative, Tricks for Tracks was perceived as more rewarding and useful. Tricks for Tracks surprised the users in terms of satisfaction as is seen from the differences in the pre and post questionnaire results. Freestyle on the other hand remained more or less constant and kept up to the expectations of the users as expressed in the pre-test questionnaire.

My Role

During the evaluation procedure my major role was to make sure that the prototypes function properly. In between two sessions, i had to run tests on the hardware prototype and fix issues that arose because of the excess collisions. I also played the role of facilitator during one fo the sessions. Furthermore I also was involved with analysing the data, building the graphs, reporting and presenting our findings in the final poster session.

Future Work

In sum, with our MusiSkate prototype, we have demonstrated how audio feedback can play a part in enhancing the experience of skateboarding and potentially being useful in long-term learning of tricks. These findings suggest applications in other trick-based sports. Future iterations will include a combination the two prototypes, finer trick detection algorithms, increasing the complexity of the reward structure and customization of musical and skateboard preferences.

Using the MusiSkate prototype we have demonstrated how audio feedback can play a part in enhancing the experience of skateboarding and potentially being useful in long-term learning of tricks. These findings suggest applications in other trick-based sports. Future iterations will include a combination the two prototypes, finer trick detection algorithms, increasing the complexity of the reward structure and customization of musical and skateboard preferences.