Second sketch (3)

Our sketch, as it is now, is more focused on the ‘space around‘, and the output, and not enough attention is on the movements themselves. This is why we are thinking of imposing some rules in the way the user should move, e.g. hands need to be attached to the body. If we do not impose any rules, ‘movement’ will only be a tool for them to explore the space, i.e. a “side effect” of the experience, and not one of the main focuses. Another point is to have speakers somewhere in the room so that the sounds and noises would be closer to the mover, and less attention there would be towards the laptop/camera. In order to make the whole experience and interaction richer, my partner mentioned we could have some hidden “sweet spots” in the space that if the mover reaches those coordinates in the space a unique/different sound will get triggered; I assume since the sound will come as a surprise, the mover will try to go back to that particular space i.e. their curiosity will be “tickled”. We could use this to encourage a certain movement. The essence of the interaction will, then, be explorative and will also have “kinesthetic development” as a theme to some extent, from the paper “Kinesthetic Interaction – Revealing the Bodily Potential in Interaction Design”. One of the downsides of this idea is that the “sweet spots” will be pre-determined and defined, which is in paradox with “exploring the space and one’s bodily skills” and that could probably take away from the “interaction” part of the experience and would transform the concept to more of a game. I do not think that is actually a negative thing per se, but it is out of the scope of this course.

We decided to change the linear space to a space that has more depth. We now have actually more space to work with. We are working with the distance between shoulders to have a “metric” of the distance between the interface and the mover, or more precisely, the position of the mover in the space.

The time is running out and I think we have to start wrapping up the project and have something simple to show, so we need to “extract” one of the attributes we came up with, instead of keeping all the different nuances. This though would risk it to get “boring” or not interactive enough. But this is something I learned from the last module, that sometimes “less” is actually “more”.

References:

[1] Fogtmann, M. H., Fritsch, J., & Kortbek, K. J. (2008). Kinesthetic Interaction – Revealing the Bodily Potential in Interaction Design. In Proceedings of the 20th Australasian conference on computer-human interaction: designing for habitus and habitat.