Preparatory Research and Analysis

Sarah Waxman

Interaction Lab

18 April 2019

My definition of interaction has run parallel to the skills that have emerged, developed, and evolved throughout this class. It is therefore much more fine-tuned than it was when I first came up with it during the group project, it addresses far more than what my previous interpretations had taken into account. My original definition of interaction took it a step further and added the word “design” in order to be able to narrow it down, because I deemed “interaction” alone to be too broad to be able to exclude any projects at all as required by these projects.

I therefore interpreted interaction to be the direct particular affectation of two or more subjects, events between which there is a period of “processing” — and, in terms of an interactive project and design, at least one such subject must be human (O’Sullivan and Igoe, 2010). Moreover, I took Tom Igoe’s idea into account that “physical computing should ideally foreground the person’s input”, and added that interactive physical computational projects should as well (Igoe, 2008). There must be a change triggered by another change, both perceptible by the system/object/device and viewer or user for interaction to be present, according to my analysis.

I overlooked a crucial element as it simply had not occurred to me to include it as I had made a dangerous assumption that it was implied: time. I have since realized that without explicitly mentioning time, this aforementioned “period of processing” can be any length of time, including infinity which would in real terms render the interaction effectively nonexistent. Consequently, I now add that this processing period must unequivocally range from 0 to any quantifiable, feasible number/length of time that is clearly defined and/or made apparent to the user or viewer. My definition has thereby evolved in a small but essential way.

Thus far, I have decided that for my final project I will create some sort of game with processing, and use a sensor controlled by an Arduino board as I really enjoyed working with sensors this semester. I plan for my project to be partially inspired by Flappy Bird, a mobile game released in 2013 that became immensely popular to such a level that it was ultimately removed from all platforms from which people could once download it in 2014 due to its “life-ruining” addictiveness (Williams, 2014). Despite its simplicity, it can most certainly be considered an interactive project as it translates a physical touch to the screen to a movement of the bird immediately (ideally).

On the other hand, an example of a very complex and technologically advanced project that does not fit into my idea of an interactive project is “CAVE”, a Virtual Reality film experience that allows the viewer to be in the virtual movie set along with other members of the audience (CAVE, 2018). While not an interactive design, it is definitely a fully immersive experience created by Academy Award winner and NYU professor Ken Perlin. In order to make it fulfill the criteria of an interactive design project, the film would need to include some sort of mechanism that gives a limited amount of control over the experience, that gives some sort of choice or movement-response between the scene/character holograms and the audience.

As a result, my “new” definition of interaction is as follows: a perceptible change that is a result or response to a person’s (spectator or user) input which therefore effectively gives the person a certain amount of control, and it must occur within a measurable and previously defined period of time. This enumeration of time may be present in the code, program, or construction behind the interactive system.

Works Cited:

CAVE, Tribeca Film Festival, Virtual Reality Lab, 2018, www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/cave-2019.

Igoe, Tom. “Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and Misses).” Code Circuits Construction, TIGOE, 27 July 2008, www.tigoe.com/blog/category/physicalcomputing/176/.

O’Sullivan, Dan, and Tom Igoe. Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. Course Technology, 2010.

Williams, Rhiannon. “What Is Flappy Bird? The Game Taking the App Store by Storm.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 29 Jan. 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10604366/What-is-Flappy-Bird-The-game-taking-the-App-Store-by-storm.html.