Presenting StreetBeat in TLV

Yesterday we presented our prototype on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. A lot of people came to be part of the experience and we were very excited to see our project come to life!

Filming our concept video

On Saturday, we went to Rothschild Boulevard in order to film our concept video. It was quite interesting... So many people were interested in our prototype -- we just couldn't film the video!

Here are some shots we took:

Curious people

Filming the first scene:

More curious people:

It's alive!

StreetBeat has come to life!
We are very excited and proud to finally present StreetBeat:

StreetBeat is Coming

On the 14th of May, Omri went to the FabLabIL (www.fablabil.org) to start production of the actual map.


Taking the design to the laser etching machine:




















It's working!

Making sure the sizes are good (AND THEY ARE):
























Neighborhood cutouts:
























Almost ready!!

And adding some hinges:

Designing a Map

In order to actually create our map, we had to first make a design that can be read by a laser etching machine.
To do this, we first created a web-page that holds a Google Map (V3) object and styled that map to be completely grayscale and to contain only layers of data that we find relevant (roads and parks).

This map was used to create our base image which was automatically traced in Illustrator to create map base. On this we separated the different neighborhoods (definition of neighborhoods taken from the very nice Tel-Aviv municipality map).

Turned into:

To these we added the relevant markings of the android devices, the peeking windows, the switches, the audio jacks and several street names.

And finally:

What's behind the window?

The user will be able to view extra pieces of information when using the 'peep-hole' in each neighbourhood on the StreetBeat map. 

Behind each peep-hole, there will be a smartphone. Since the peep-holes are shaped as circles, only a part of the screen will be visible and the user will be able to learn more about the neighbourhood that he's listening to. 

Here are a few photos of these screens:

Mentor Presentation

Following today's presentation, given at the IDC to the mentors, we have received the following critique (Integrated for our convenience):

• The issue of the switch should be better explained (Oren and Guy later agreed that this will come when our demo is better defined)
• The main psychological concept should be cultural differences alongside the bridging of them
• We should consider allowing users to manually upload content (such as pictures)
• The map should have more added value compared with the app (we should consider time based statistics and/or map-app interaction)
• The presentation should give more emphasis on the issue of popularity
• There should be more music in the presentation

Preparing for our presentation!

Itamar preparing for his part of the presentation, explaining how our prototype works

Noam is practicing his part of the presentation

"Behind the scenes"

A close-up of our prototype

Whoops, phone call!

User Testing

On Saturday, we went to the beach in Herzliya, to ask a few people for their opinion on our prototype.

We asked them what kind of information they would like to see on the map. Most of the answers were pretty similar: Age difference in music, if a song is played while walking, jogging or sitting, sex difference.


Single Tile User Testing from Itamar Gilon on Vimeo.

Additional feedback supported our decision to play each song for 20 seconds,
helped us decide which of the two statistics windows we should use-swivel or hatch-style,
and made it clear that international  city to city comparison is something people are
very interested in.