Step 1
For your blog post, post about the three projects that you critiqued.
Project 1: Ball of Confusion by Olivia
This project intends to make a Mario style game in which the player can control a ball to bounce and bump into objects for points by jumping/stamping on a platform. When an object is hit, educational information about world problems pop up to the player. This is meant to bring up awareness in users of young generations of their future world.
Olivia features her definition of interaction with being flexible and having potential of create different versions even under the same system. This reminds me of the randomness we brought up in our definition: We agree on that interaction is not programmed to a fix course but one with possibilities.
In the feedback stage, I gave comments on the positioning of the project: Is it a serious project aiming at education, or a game project with more fun? Whichever it is, the other side might give negative effect on its aura. Also, the popping-up messages might to some extent interrupt the game experience.
Project 2: Anger Visualizer by Rudy Song
This project is inspired by a traditional animation presenting form: When a character gets angry, steams flush out of his ears. Rudy intends to visualize the anger of the user by making that steam special effect. The project is designed to sense the heartbeat of the participant and springs out steam when the data go higher. In a funny, friendly form, Rudy means to encourage users to let out thier passive emotions sometimes.
Rudy gives high attention to the role of translation of message form in interaction, so he puts emphasis on the visualization of invisible emotions.
What we concerned about is how to trigger the user to be angry during testing. Another problem is, rising heartrates do not only indicate anger but also other emotions such as nervousness and fear. According to faculty’s advice, making a robot that substitutes the human user to be the “angry” subject might be a good choice.
Project 3: The Super Bow by Henry Shatter
This project is a family video game: two players use bow sensors to shoot simulated targets on screen which has answers for multiple choice questions presented also on screen. The faster one player hits the target of correct answer, the more points he gets.
Henry emphasizes building connection and competition between actors in his definition of interaction. This is a new idea to me, but it somehow echoes one of the features my partner Karen points out, which is human-centered.
Step 2
From your notes, write down any feedback that you received.
For our project, I received two precious feedbacks. One is a practical detail: In our project, participants are required to answer questions and be taken their heartrate, but the reading and digesting stage of the questions might also effect their emotion and make the data unstable/unreliable. Another is that maybe more kinds of sensors can be included in our project to add to its complexness.
I think both comments make good sense to our improvement of the project. By now we have been considering changing the form of questioning, but I think we still need more user experience feedback after the prototype is complete.