Feedback Fun

After today's proposal feedback session I am feeling a lot better about the state of our project. Getting the feedback late last night was a little disheartening  and left me feeling like our concept and idea was not good enough. Though after discussing with all of the tutors it seems that our major issue was just the way that we communicated our concept and our interaction method, so hopefully we can do a much better job of explaining during the presentation on Friday.

Based on the feedback we thought a lot more about how the application would actually work and what we would project. We have settled on an installation table where users could sit and place their arms into the view of a projector and kinect. Both the projector and kinect would be mounted above the user and displaying images down onto the users.

Maree helped us define a scenario in which it would be used and how it would work which gave us a much better idea of how to communicate it. In the scenario two users would sit on opposite sides of the installation. One user would have a small seed projected onto their arm when it entered the projected space, while another user would have a rain cloud projected onto them. When the two users extend their arms and touch each other the cloud would rain droplets 'down' onto the seed. So particles would be animated across the two arms and allow the users to share the story.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/qcAmlo3.jpg[/img]

We briefly (and very badly) storyboarded the idea out within the group to make sure everyone was on the same page. And run through how we could physically act out the scenario during Fridays presentation to make it clear to the audience. Having the seed grow from the rain into a sapling and then into a full grown tree with the trunk crossing both users arms.

Now its time to think more about the human values and the emotions we are intending to evoke in people interacting with our project and the type of experience we want to delivery. Our initial ideas and themes all center around nature and growth. So I think we want to give people a sense of stillness and calm and a feeling of building something. Then adding in some playful and more surprising interactions to take advantage of the physical nature of the story telling. For example we discussed what kind of reactions we might get if the tree from the scenario was cut down. Wood chips flying everywhere and then disappearing from the users arms.