There were five people in our group so I critiqued on four other projects during recitation. The first project is a game inspired by Flappy Bird and The Avengers. Two players on different sides would control the Thanos and the Avengers separately. The Avengers have multiple arms to attack Thanos. If they shoot him down within 1 minute, then the Avengers win. Otherwise, Thanos wins. The second project is an immersive one which allows users to explore nature together with ancient Chinese music. By touching on the flowers, the user would be able to hear different Chinese ancient melodies. The aim of this project is to provide a recreational feeling for the people living in such a fast-paced society and raise people’s awareness of culture. The third project is also a game. Two players will control a whale and a garbage-collecting ship in the ocean separately. The whale has to stay away from all the garbages in the sea and the ship needs to help collect the garbage. If the whale was hit by any floating barriers, they both die. In the end, the fourth project is still a game. However, in this single-player entertainment, the user will only be able to see a small fraction of the map and for the most of the time, they need to judge their direction forward by hearing the sound positions from their headphones. If they can’t tell the difference in tones, they will meet a monster and dies.
For the first project, I think it is a little bit too easy because the only way for players to interact in the game is either through buttons or joysticks. However, I really like the idea to combine the most popular movies with the project we are going to make. The second project has very good concepts and ways of interaction. Indeed, too many of us need to slow down our life paces and be nurtured with immersive cultural and natural experience. Meanwhile, they connected technology with living creatures, which could make traditional ways of interaction more close to human beings. The only problem is that they may not have too many time to achieve what they want since their plan is really ambitious. The concept of caring about our marine creatures in the third project is also something I like very much. But since they haven’t come up with very specific plans of what ways of interaction they would use in their project, I could not offer further comments on their interactive experience. The last idea of the last project is very sophisticated and I think it would bring the best experience to users if they could realize their proposal. It is just they have to overcome two difficulties that are central to the user experience. The first is the idea of making the sound come from different directions. The other is illuminating the areas around the player and make the illumination move as the player moves.
In terms of interaction, I feel we do not have to stick around Processing by making a game. In this case, users’ interaction with the computer would be limited to joysticks, buttons, mouses or keyboard. Dating back to our midterm, we used many more ways for our interaction such as distance sensors, LED lights, etc. I don’t think we should focus that much on the content we present. Instead, we should still go back and pay our attention to the ways of interaction.
My group members offered me a lot of useful examples. They told me that based on making a paintbrush, I can add different styles of filters or make the stroke smoother. We should also add a function to save the paintings our users have created. Because we are making a piece of painting equipment for people with disabilities, it is also a good idea to add links or QR codes to raise money for charity organizations. To illustrate the potential of our project, we should first make some examples by ourselves to show others what amazing artwork can they create. The most successful part is that what we plan to make is a tool instead of a game, which means people will not get bored with it. The least successful thing is that they may not realize what can they do with the machine and it is our responsibility to tell them how to unlock the possibilities. I think what they said during the recitation is very useful and I will definitely integrate their ideas into our final project. We should make the mission, the usage, and the potential audience more obvious when we really begin to make the project.