- The Veldt: the Intelligent Closet
The interactive artifact I’ve come up with is called “the intelligent closet”. In the hi-tech universe which the narrative takes place, people highly depend on technology in order to make their life more efficient. Undoubtedly, in terms of everyday outfit, people still choose to let machines do the work. Once you tell the closet where you would go today and which style you would prefer, the closet will automatically process the information along with the temperature, weather of the day and your body figure. Then it will produce the most suitable clothes in a few minutes and automatically dress you up. An existing technology I’ve found similar to my concept is “the virtual dressing room”, which captures customers’ body figures in real time and subsequently presents a virtual image of how the customer look like. These two artifacts both automatically detect body figures, but the output of the intelligent closet is physical objects instead of virtual 3D images. Finally, the potential problem of the intelligent closet may be the unstable quality of the clothes.
- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:
The interactive artifact I’ve come up with is called ”Emotion-based Light Controller”. As described in the story, people in Omelas maintain their happiness at the cost of the misery of the child, which is a tragic paradox. But small improvement can still be made to be more humanistic. Since the child is not entitled to both sunshine and happiness, people can use the sensors to detect the pulse, muscle tension and facial expression of the child, reflecting his emotional state. Then the sensors visualize his emotion by controlling the brightness of the room. In other words, if the child’s feeling extremely depressed, the devices will brighten the room based on the intensity of emotion as a way of comfort. The similar device I found is developed by scientists at University of New South Wales, Sydney. It makes use of clothing lights up according to the wearer’s mood, converting physical information into coloured light animations that emulate different emotions. The difference of these two devices lies in the form of output. I do foresee new problems caused by the existence of this imaginary device. It may fail to quantify our complicated emotion, since it only has access to outward expressions but not inner thoughts.
- The Plague:
The interactive artifact I’ve come up with is called “Large-scale Silicon Detector”, inspired by the infrared imaging system used to detect the thermal condition on earth. In the story, governments may use the detector to search areas with high concentrations of silicon, in other words, to look for those who are in their early stages of infection on a large scale. Specifically, when these people with silicon inside their body move around, the detector senses their motions as well as the concentrations, and then visualizes the images of relevant areas. The existing technology similar to my concept is the infrared imaging system as I mentioned above. While the infrared imaging system is for thermal use, the silicon detector is for a certain element and motion detecting. The potential problems caused by this invention is that it may mistakenly detect other silicon products.