Five Senses
I am in a group along with Mia, Ray, Wayne and Campbell. We five together came up with the artifact called five senses, which is a mask that can record the five senses of the user ( tactile sense, visual sense, auditory sense, olfactory sense and taste) and transmit them to another user later on.
Origins and Background
Our artifact, the mask called “five senses”, is originated from the story of Newton’s Sleep. In our discussion about the artifact, the first idea wasn’t actually the five senses mask. I t was a pair of glasses that can navigate visually imparied people as well as reading aloud written down informations. This idea came from one character in the story called Esther, who has bad eyesight and needs surgery for her eyes. However, after doing researches upon that artifact, we found out that similar inventions has already been created with the name of AngelEye.
So we tried to make some improvements and adjustments to the glasses to make it unique. My artifact for Newton’s Sleep was a pair of AR glasses for citizens to see the scenery on Earth. Combining these ideas together, we finally came up with the artifact of a special mask to record people’s senses. To put it into the story, this mask can help the citizens who are living out of earth to regain an experience of lives on Earth, for the elder people are missing that memory.
Building and Performing
The building part isn’t that hard as all we need to do is cutting a mask. We used cardboard and paper for that.
Instead, we focused more on the performance and the story of it. To better illustrate the function, we used a drama way to perform a murder case. To tell the story in short, a man was killed with the five sense mask on, then a girl passing by found the body and put the mask on out of curiosity, then she experienced the whole process just happened and thus found out the real murderer. In this story, we tried to illustrate that the mask can represent the five senses to the user by replaying the murder case in front of the girl. For the story involves fierce quarrel and drama-like killing part, we rehearsed a lot and polished the performance by changing details and dialogues from time to time.
And here is the video of our rehearsal.
About the Interaction
Intuitively, the five senses mask involves two parts of interaction. Firstly, the user interacts with the mask to record the five senses, the mask would sense whatever the user has got with the outsider world. And secondly, the mask interacts with the another user to present and share the recorded senses and feelings.
But I would also think that this special mask creates different kinds of interaction. By regarding the mask not as one object of the interaction but the tunnel, we have the two users actually interacting with each other. The two users shared “part of the memory” using the mask. However, this won’t actually meet with my definition of Interaction in the pervious documentation. Since the later user can’t actually give feedback to the first user as the interaction doesn’t happen simultaneously. In this sense, I may here raise an improvement as that two users wearing the masks can share senses with each other simultaneously.
Last but not least, from another point of view, to some extent we can say that the later user is interacting with the scene he/she senses through the mask. But the same flaw exists that the scene can’t give feedback (output) to the later user. So the improvement mentioned above may also be adapted here to complete the interaction process.
Successes and Failures
For the successes, I think my group has came up with a really interesting and helpful idea. Though we performed the mask within a murder case, there can be various usages of the mask (if it can really be created). Also, I would think that the drama is a nice way to illustrate the functions of the mask and the murder scenario is unique and attracting.
For the failures, I think there are many aspects we can improve and do better. First, we didn’t spend much time in building the artifact, though the mask is easy to create, we could have chances to further perfect it and having it shown some of the functions. Secondly, our story of performance may be too complicated and not easy to understand within a five-minute performance. We didn’t find the best way to present the function of “having the five senses of another person”. What’s more, there exists some flaws in the designing of the mask. For example, one professor raised one question that what would happen if one get sleep with the mask on. We actually wasn’t sure about the answer because we hadn’t really think about how the mask would sense and record everything. By completing the setting and details of the mask could help us further understand it.
Review on The Helmet of Emotions
The Helmet of Emotions is a helmet that enables people to regain their emotions when putting it on. People can feel the emotion of happy, anger, sympathy, sad and so on. For the background story, this artifact is based on Newton’s Sleep. It is said that humans in the story regard emotions as useless and they don’t show these feelings up in daily life. So the helmet is invented to let people regain their emotions towards everything and have a normal human live.
I think this artifact is pretty relevant to the story as they looked deep into the personality and characteristics of the citizens in Newton’s Sleep. Though I think people there may not be willing to actually use this helmet, I think this invention is creative and interesting. Furthermore, this helmet also raises a deeper social problem that people tends to be indifference and selfish when interacting with others, especially when communicating through the Internet. This invention enables us to pay more attention to this problem.
For the artifact they built and the performance, it really amazed me a lot that they got balloons with different colors representing different emotions, bursting one balloon means the showing of one certain emotion. I think this design is truly unique and understandable. The performance illustrated the invention clearly. I wasn’t sure why the characters were speaking and reacting emotionlessly at first, but when the helmet came out the balloon bursted, I got the key idea of the invention loud and clear. Also, the performers dealt with the emergency (the balloon won’t burst when pulling the trigger) on the stage calmly and actively, making the emergency not flaws but outstanding points for the whole performance.
I think the artifact and the performance are already pretty nice. For some tiny suggestions, I would think that building the helmet easier to use (easier to burst the balloon when pulling the trigger) may further perfect the performance. Also, at the beginning part of the performance, there was a long introduction to the background by one speaking, I may suggest that convey the background knowledge by the way of act may be more intuitive and attracting. Overall, I think The Helmet of Emotions is a creative and interesting artifact along with an excellent performance.