Step 1

Musical Colors

Musical Colors is a music game, in which one or two players can play songs by pressing the buttons in accordance with the colored blocks shown on the screen. The suggestion we gave was to increase the interactivity between players. In the original plan, two players need to press the key at the same time to play the notes, but they still play separately, and we think it might be better if they can play it together. For example, I suggested the keys could be placed further away from each other so that one player can’t play it with ten fingers. Players have to cooperate when several blocks show up together. The idea of two players play one song makes the project unique from other music games and it also aligns with my definition of interaction. Players interact with the machine, while at the same time their actions affect each other as well.

A Melody Interactive Installation

This project intends to create an experience for users. There will be several fake water lilies made by plastic spoons placed on a shelf and when users interact with it, it will give sound feedback of “bianzhong”. They haven’t decided on the way to interact, but they were thinking about using hands or a stick. So we explored some possibilities of the way to interact and suggested to use sensors like light sensor, instead of pressure sensor, because the feeling of the experience should be more gentle. And we also suggested them to put water lilies on “water” to make the experience more immersive. I think one interesting part of their project is the atmosphere it creates by combining water lilies and the sound of “bianzhong”, which adds more cultural meaning to modern technology.

Your Pet Plant

Your Pet Plant is designed to arouse human’s awareness of plants’ important role in environmental issues by externalizing the connections between human and plants. The project will use Processing to show an electronic plant and by clicking a certain part of the plant, a physical plant will give feedback like sound, light or movement. There is no detailed plan of how exactly the plant will react and it could be hard to build the physical part as he needs to combine Arduino with the plant. So we suggested him to make a more detailed plan and especially take components like wires into consideration. This project uses technology to visualize the interaction between human and plant and I think this idea is interesting and reveals a new perspective of interaction.

Step 2

For my project, firstly, I wasn’t sure about how it will work when multiple users are involved, so asked my group members for suggestions. My group members suggested me to make the tree grow faster, and when a tree is fully grown, it can add another tree. I will take this suggestion for now, as I’m also afraid my original plan might be confusing for users and hard to achieve on Processing, but I’m still open for changes depending on user testing feedback. One more problem they pointed out was that my project is designed to reduce the time we spend on phones, but in order to show the growing tree, I need another screen. I’ve also thought about the problem before, but due to technical restriction, I need processing to generate tree animation. We’ve also discussed other possibilities of how to present feedback. However, I still think using Processing is more ideal, but I will do more research on this and try to find inspirations from other projects.