Final Project Proposal Essay: Break Free
In modern university, we take the pressure and be stressful sometimes. We need to keep getting A so that we can get a high GPA to get a good job or get an admission of the graduate university; we need to do a lot of work to maintain the relation with friends, professor, colleagues, etc.; we need to work and learn alone far away from home… We need to face many challenges. So depression or self-denying is pretty common in nowadays college life. My inspiration for my final project is that recently I experience something unhappy: family, love relation, academic life. I used to lock myself but I opened my mind luckily. I know the pain so I want to do something for the people who have the same experience as me. For an interaction project, the idea of making a game directly comes to my mind. But the challenge is that designing and making a game is a huge work, which means that it is hard for me to finish all the work within two weeks. I not only need to prepare hardware for my project but I need to code as well.
My project basically will be an escaping game, which means that the students need to try to get out of depression and open his mind. I will make the escaped room dark(but always visible) and depressing. In order to break the door and free the student’s mind, users need to finish four mission to get the password. Users need to enter the password by pressing the physical button(made by Arduino) to get out of the room. So it is clear that for button pad, we will use Arduino to make it; for the room and gaming part, we will use processing to provide users an autistic atmosphere by drawing the room and insert pictures in cold color. We will design some riddle or plot for the users to discover the password by themselves, which will make the users get involved and interact with our project and design. For next week, we will mainly focus on physical button making and the basic processing coding. The second week we will add our detailed design to the processing and finally connect the computer with the Arduino part.
My previous research actually does not provide me a direct inspiration for this project. Instead, it helps me break the basic definition of interaction. In fact, Input can be output, the output can be input. So the question occurs in my brain: what will happen if I make processing as input and output at the same time. So I break the boundaries between input and output. In my project, users will follow the instruction and plot which are shown on screen, which is definitely output. But at the same time, users still need to click the mouse to keep exploring, so the processing can also be the output. Also, I will consider adding some buzzer or LEDs in Arduino pad so that the Arduino part can also be the output. My project has two potential impacts. Firstly, for interaction, I think the barriers between input and output sometimes can be broken through. That will be more interactive. Secondly, my project aims to help the students who are in trouble with some tough situation. Even though my project will still be primitive and rough because I do not have enough time to decorate and make it to the best. But I want to use my project to appeal to people to help the struggling friends around you, especially your best friend.