Twitch Lounge
Twitch Lounge
December 2016
Twitch Lounge encourages people to interact in a cluster and visualizes the relationship in the chat, just like what would happen in the real life. I was the visual designer in this team.
Demo
There is a live demo hosted on Herokuapp: Invite your friends and roam in the lounge together!
Conception
Twitch.tv is an online game streaming platform. Usually when people enter a channel, there is a live streaming video, with a chat room on its right. However the chat room is just like an upgraded IRC, with no hierarchies showing people's relationships in the chat room. Besides, the chat history scrolls really fast, and is very hard for people to digest. How can we redesign the chat room to mimic conversations in the real life?
(Concept screen) People's in-chat relation might look like constellations. An edge between two nodes (two viewers) denotes their interactions. The brighter the edge is, the more recent the interactions are. The bigger the node is, the more popular its corresponding view is. The yellow one denotes the streamer themselves, while the purple one denotes the user.
And how are we going to allow the players interact with the streamers, instead of obsessed within their own circles?
(Concept screen) People might also vote to help the streamers decide their game strategies.
With these questions, we designed Twitch Lounge to promote real life chatting experience.
Screenshot from the final project. The avatars glowing in white are people considered to be within the same "circle", and only those people can hear each other, as if they were forming a private group in real life, and whispering to each group members.
Future
For the future we might want to add in more interactive elements to encourage people grouping together.
(Concept screen) Add more tables for people to group around might be interesting.
Our framework was used in a PhD HCI student's study on implementing a hierarchical structure for Twitch chat to help maintain the chatroom etiquette.
Check out more
PacRun
Augmented Reality Pac-Man. Run in real life to avoid the monsters appearing on Google Maps!