Project Name: “Echo”
The inspiration comes from the shouting’s decompression effect by natural, yet people are restrained from actually doing that by various reasons, usually the fear of disturbing others. So we try to provide the user a reason to justify their act of screaming, which is to say, providing a place for people to release their pressure. And following that thought, we consider that the use of technology to provide feedback may possibly help people understand how stressful the status they are in and thus help them to confirm the relieving effect.
The project “Echo” will mainly translate your audio input into the visual output on the computer screen and simutaneously, keep monitoring your heartrate to estimate your stage of nervousness. Considering the resources we have, the latter one may be much harder, so it may be the main problem we may face. What we are trying to solve is the lack of related knowledge and possible equipment. Besides, as the main aim is not to encourage people to keep screaming or make noise but to achieve the conforting effect through that mean.The key issue is that we focus on is the visualization of the signal, which should aim to render a relaxing atmosphere. About that points, according to the pervious research we’ve made about the existing decompression softwares’ methodologyies, they usually use gentle movement of simple objects like circles/rectangles/triangles accompanied with generally relaxing soft music. We are considering taking the similar ideology as guidance in designing the program for the patterns.
To expand our project futher, we wish to translate the movement of the users simutanously. With viberation sensor and pressure sensor, we may also take the physical movement of the tester as a mean of input, thus expanding its interactivity. We also want to persuade our audience to wear or experience our device, so we decided to design something more appealing with a more desginated visual guidance. To achieve that, we decide to adopt a the idea our classmate suggested in class that we can design a device to control the elevation of the helmet to enhance the ceremonial sense.
To me, the definition of interaction is similar to the communication between human beings, as we convey messages through not only words but gesture, facial expression and body language as well, and the process to improve the interactivity of a certain project is to expand the way it reads and expresses itself, in other words, to intercept and to output.