Project 1
Title: The World In Your Hands
Project statement and purpose: The project is deeply inspired by THIS project called interactive gloves that I had researched. And I thought it an interesting idea to use gestures instead of the keyboard to realize different functions in a game. Combining this idea with an already interactive and developed idea of “Panorama” or “3D IVR” (I’m not sure if I can do that but that definitely will be really cool!), this project would work like this: assigning some particular gestures to according movements, like turning left, turning right and going forward, the user can simply make different gestures to “walk around” the city, or more specifically, the limited places that I photographed. And there is also a more advanced version of my idea, which required an even larger workload: the sensors on the gloves can detect the heart rate of the user and tell whether the user is in a happy, calm or sad mood, and then the scene will be showing s sunny, a cloudy, and a rainy or snowy scene accordingly.
Drawings and sketches:
Project 2
Title: The Forest Maze
Project statement and purpose: This game is to challenge and test out how mentally-tough the players are, by constantly monitoring the heart rates of the players and playing spooky music accordingly to make them feel nervous during the process of finding their way out of the maze. In this single-player game, there will be a maze drawn on the screen and players will be able to control a little dot through two potentiometers that control the x and y positions respectively. And to make this game more interactive, there will be scary music, danger alerts showing on the screen now and then, and visuals of foggy forests, and the faster the heart beats, the larger those “scary effects” are going to be. And if the player succeeded to get to the exit without hitting the edges or walls of the maze, he/she will receive a triumph and then be led to another more complicated maze. However, if the player hit the edges, then the game is over. (But I’m also expecting to design some “crossable” walls and some unexpected secret ways to find the exit of the maze so that the players can explore the game herself/himself and gets better with growing experience.
Drawings and sketches:
Project 3
Title: A robot psychiatrist
Project statement and purpose: I was inspired by THIS meme that was at one time commonly seen and shared in my moments. And I will probably use a text-to-speech module to produce the indifferent synthesized sound of what a normal robot would sound like. And the interaction goes like this: the “patient” will be asked questions like “What is the one thing in your mind that has been disturbing you recently?”, “Do you think this is related to your childhood experiences?”, “Have you tried talking about this with your friends and families” and “Do you think you have a healthy relationship with your family and friends?”… And every time the “patients” are trying to answer these questions, the screen will be showing some “seemingly” recognized words and sentences that are actually programmed beforehand. And the conversation will end up with “Don’t worry, everything will get better” just like the diagram. And the design of the “fake” speech recognition is also trying to satire the indifference of the psychiatrists in that they don’t care what you are actually saying and they just throw you a “Don’t worry” at the end when what you really want is the actual help or emotional support. And the reason why I want to make this design is that so many friends around me, including myself, have come up to a counselor or psychiatrist in great hope, but left extremely disappointed and even more depressed. I wonder how these so-called psychiatrists work and where the sincere and warm part that they can actually provide went. And I really hope that more work can be done to improve this whole system or else it can be simply replaced by some dumb robots.
Drawings and sketches:
The meme:
Updates of Project 3: A robot psychiatrist
I will probably be using a big wooden laser-cutting-made box with multiple drawers inside, and with the “psychiatrist” asking “Which one of them do you think best describes the problem that is disturbing you recently? Squeeze it to continue.” The four drawers containing four types of fruits pop out in a sequence (which is greatly inspired by what Professor Misky recommended to me: Makey Makey, in order to increase to satire vibe by using some fancy but unimportant things). And I will assign a particular type of problem to a specific fruit and the “psychiatrist” will then be asking related questions. And in the middle of the conversation, when the sensor detects a long pause or after asking a “tough” question, a drawer will pop up with a tissue box inside, and interrupt the patient by saying “Take your time. No need to rush. Here’s some tissue and you can cry a little.” With regard to the screen, it will show different backgrounds when “listening” and “speaking”. And I will probably be using BitVoicer Server to recognize the speech. To establish a strict, oppressive, and expert in the sense of excelling at making patients cry easily king of image, I will use some technical terms that normal psychiatrists use to make patients feel vulnerable. 