Interaction Lab Group Research Project Record

As the title, our project is called Promax Nebulous 3000 Cyber. To make a brief introduction, it’s an AI wing which can be a vehicle but more than a vehicle. It can be a personal assistant like Jarvis in Iron Man. 

Manufacturing process & rehearsal

Firstly, we needed to make the cardboard wings as the AI wings in the story. To make it  manipulable, we threaded the strings through the tops of the wings so that the performer, which was me, could hold the strings to make the wings wave. 

Making the fledgling stage

Pretty good

The final version of the wings

After making the body of the project, we also needed to make the background, which we made it like a book that could turn pages. Turning the page symbolizes both sides of this Omelas. People are always reluctant to turn the shiny page to see the darkness behind it, when in fact they coexist and cannot be separated. I was mainly responsible for the background and painting during the production.

The process of painting

Also, we set up such a part of the episode where we let the wings fly away with all of Omelas. Here we made a little egg.

Our lovely professors

Another crucial thing for us was to write the script. In this part, we built a Google Doc to edit the script together, so that everyone could participate in and posted their opinion.

Part of the final draft of our script.

We started to rehearse when the first version of the script was done, recorded the time of our performance and modified our script depended on that. Also we let the narrator sit in the seat to stimulate the audience.

Rehearsal

Video of rehearsal

Comment

For our show: I think the success of our work is that it is completely immersed in the worldview of the original story, presenting the audience with an alternative possibility for the story’s ending: that child need not continue to suffer after having everyone in the Omelas leave. And where we fell short I think was that it didn’t have a strong interactive format, or that the main body of our performance was the story rather than the installation. That’s something we thought about but didn’t know how to improve. In terms of the form of interaction, it actually meets my definition. This AI wing it can be manipulated by the user and at the same time will give feedback to the user. I think what could be improved is that we could include more information about how the wings work and what they do during our performance, to emphasize the function of the device more.

For other show: I would like to comment on the project of GroupD: The Suit. As far as the format of the performance and the content of the installation goes, their project I love. The performance was very entertaining and introduced exactly what the installation would do. I thought the process of assembling their armor was very interesting. But I don’t think their installations are as interactive. It can be manipulated by the wearer to protect the wearer, but it has no other interactive elements and doesn’t have some deeper role or meaning.