New thoughts about “interaction”:

What contributes to a successful interactive experience is a very insightful question. And at first, when we were doing the group project, we just thought of interaction as people and the machine having mutual input and output and that’s enough. So we made a robot that can provide different help according to the petrified state of the person, it was relatively intelligent, but the input provided by the people was actually not enough. And we had a kind of similar problem when we were doing our midterm. So the users just wore the heartbeat sensor on their ears and pressed the button, and that was basically all for what the users could do. Then we would show the visualized image of their heartbeat frequency and let them know how fast their heartbeat was. Though the feedbacks from the users were generally good, we still think that the interaction between users and our project was kind of lacking. The above is my further understanding of interactivity from my group project and midterm.

So now I think “interaction” should be more mutual and users need to do more input, and in turn, they will get a deeper experience. People will have a better experience in this project after the interaction is more in-depth, In the book, Ernest Edmonds says that “an interaction, be it with another human, an artwork, or a game, can influence internal states.” So I now think that interaction should also have a deeper impact on the user, rather than just staying in a momentary sensory experience.

The first interactive project I chose is “Gesture Controlled Interactive Table Light.” This project mainly consists of a sensor and FastLED, and the user’s gestures will be transmitted to this sensor, and then FastLED will change the color of the light. I think its interactive part is successful, it fully changes the light color according to the user’s input, which is their gesture. And the color of the lights will have a mental impact on the user while the user is using this table light. So the combination of user input and the output of this project is well worth learning from.

The second interactive project I chose is “UW-Makeathon: Laser Drums.“The main body of the project is a number of drums made of laser-cut wooden boards that emit different types of sounds when struck, and are visualized on the neopixel. I think this combination of music and visuals and drums is very good. And I might work with music and instruments as well, and also apply some visual stuff to make the whole thing like a game.