Step 1:
Monica’s Project:
Monica’s (I hope her name is actually Monica because now I’m not sure) project, titled “A Project in Sound,” intends to act as a role-playing game (RPG) to escape from reality: or, as Monica calls it, “imagination diversion.” She sounded very ambitions claiming that there would be many, many different possible endings. My advice was, from experience playing RPGs, that some choices can be “game-changing,” but others can just queue different dialogue responses but end the scene in the same way. In other words, don’t overburden yourself with too many endings when the user can feel the same level of interactivity from fewer changes. Once you split the story once, twice, three times, it begins to become very difficult and time-consuming. As far as input methods for choices, she would like to use sensors to activate when you put your hand over it. There would be two options for each encounter, and the game would last roughly 5 minutes. Personally, I don’t see much difference between “A Project in Sound” and an RPG I can play I my phone (besides the input method). Our definitions of interaction seem to line up pretty well, as both agents change their actions based on the other’s previous action to achieve a particular goal.
Serene’s Project
Her project is called “Driving into Imagination,” and is also an RPG style project. The main idea is that the user chooses different paths to drive along, but every path strays more and more from reality. In essence, the environment becomes like someone’s imagination. Serene also wants to add key functions to play songs on the radio while playing. One question that wasn’t cleared up for me was how the scene changes will work. Will the car always be still on-screen, or is there movement of the vehicle, environment, etc.. Another idea we gave her was to think of an ending for the game. Where are you driving to? Are there different destinations? Can you crash from a wrong turn? These questions hopefully helped guide her to create a more interactive and dynamic interactive experience. Again, our versions of interaction line up fairly well. If she can provide a path or goal for her project, I believe it will be more successful.
Daniel’s Project
Daniel plans to create what he calls an “Interactive Heartrate Monitor.” This project will measure the user’s heart rate from a finger and display it on a screen. At the same time, a series of images and words geared to trigger thought-provoking mental activity will be displayed under the heart rate. Ideally, the user will be able to see how each image/phrase changed their heart rate and leave them pondering about the images they saw. Unfortunately, we collectively agreed that users will not see this as the experience he hopes they will. I suggested he includes headphones with relaxing sounds, perhaps alpha waves or whatever sounds that would bring the user from reality into the project. The interaction level in this project does not reflect how I define interaction because there is little chance the user will reflect on the project after use. The user may likely forget the experience and move to the next project, eliminating a part of the interactivity Daniel had in mind.
Step 2
For our project, Monica recommended somehow incorporating simple instructions for an easy tune to play in order to give users a goal, instead of them just playing what they want. Another person recommended finding people with no musical background to user test to see if we are achieving our plan (we both have music experience, so it may be difficult to know).
The most successful part was the pressure sensor as the mouthpiece—and I agree—because it is clearly intuitive. Although we did not explicitly discuss the least successful part of our project it seemed to be the “simple” part. The group members seemed to think that the project would be more complicated than playing a regular instrument. I disagreed, not because it would be hard though. Clearly, it will be difficult to play, but the point is that it is easy to understand and requires no previous knowledge, meaning the learning curve is light.
We will definitely incorporate a few things into our project. For one, will create a goal for people to accomplish, perhaps making them harder and harder if users want to attempt them. Next, from Daniel’s (my partner, not the same Daniel from my group) group we received an idea to use a disposable mouthpiece. Lastly, we are currently brainstorming if we can make inputs more intuitive than we have in order to avoid any unnecessary complications.