The Veldt – Ray Bradbury: In this story, the main characters live in a room that can provide all the services in daily life, like washing clothes and cooking delicious dishes and what impressed me most is the nursery which can read children’s thoughts and then transform the room into the imagined place. After reading this fiction, I come up with an idea that it is possible to build a room which has different kinds of musical instruments and can play by themselves but the way they play is based on the heartbeat of people walking inside. The room will also appear the scenes which is consistent with their heartbeat and recorded in advance, and finally shown by shadow casting technique. When people’s heartbeat is very fast, the musical instruments will play at the quick mode and thus furious music and happy scenes will come out. If people’s heartbeat changes to slower ones, the musical instruments will play at the small mode. All these mode are set beforehand by putting in programs which are designed to control objects which can struck musical instruments. I also found one existing project which is similar to mine, designed by George Zisiadis. The project prepared music that would complement different heart rate levels in advance. The unit which users touch will detect their pulse and then an algorithm determines the best sounds to play for them. My project is different from this project because the music in my project is directly produced by the instruments and it is more like the form of symphony and thus it is more immersive with scenes shown in the room. The problem this room may have is that it is difficult for instruments to change gently when people’s heartbeat transforms from quick to slow.
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – Ursula K. Le Guin: This story by unfolding a story of people living in Omelas showed me that people may get satisfaction by seeing others who live worse than themselves but may also realize that they actually also do not live such a good life. I then come up the idea that may be we can set up a project that provides three mirrors around the viewer and these three mirrors show different pictures when the viewer look at them. These pictures are composed of different elements which are prepared beforehand and will be added into the picture when the viewer look at the mirror. The viewers will wear helmets that can show videos of various contents while also scanning their brain to check what content attract and depress them most. The data helmet get will then be transmitted into the three mirrors to help them build pictures. I found the existing technology that can scan the brain for depression cure named PET. A PET scan can compare brain activity during periods of depression with normal brain activity. An increase of blue and green colors, along with decreased white and yellow areas, shows decreased brain activity due to depression. However, this technology of scanning brain is not that advanced and need to be developed for my project. The problem this project may have is that it may be difficult for the picture to look natural because it is built by fixed elements in the database and if I choose to use a natural one which is designed before, it may cause repetition.
The Plague by Yan Leisheng: This story shows how authority occupy the world and ignore the preciousness of human being in the extreme situation under the transmitting of plague worldwide. I then come up with the idea that it is meaningful to build an artifact that provides several labyrinths where users can use remote control to monitor a robot to try to find the exit of one labyrinth, but they will finally find that it is impossible to get away from the labyrinth after many times of trying because the labyrinth is designed to be that. However, if the robot accidentally hit the wall, the sensor will warn and another robot will catch and place it into another labyrinth. I found one project named Sisyphus which is an installation featuring two robots engaged in endless cyclic interaction designed by Kachi Chan, similar to the concept of my architect. In this project, it also involves robots, the smaller robots building brick arches, while a giant robot pushes them down – suggesting the circumstance of construction and deconstruction. In this way, it also shows the antagonism between the authority and regular people. However, the authority in my project is represented by both the labyrinths and the robot that catches the robot hits walls in labyrinths. The problem my project may have is that users may find the weird thing about the labyrinths at the beginning which is against my initial design.