Ideation Session 01: Projector, Camera... "screen"?

Azmina, Paul and I sat down to come up with ideas. We looked at various things, from what could be detected by the camera, which was to be our "sensing" tool, to the possible emotions that would be created through the experience of our space.

We ended up coming up with four main ideas. the first was dependent on the placement and clustering of people in a space. Using a camera and projector placed on the ceiling, we are able to detect where clusters of people are located on the floor below then, depending on the concentration of people in any given area, project white spotlights of varying light intensity on those areas. At the same time, areas that are left relatively unattended would be given to more subdued colored lights, blues and purples perhaps, to signify their general attitude towards being neglected.

The second idea involved using other objects instead of ourselves or other people. We were thinking of how a room could read a person's emotions or intentions by the way they manipulated the objects in the room. We thought of using other objects, perferably ones with some kind of pleasant tactile sense to them, to control the room's responses. Generally these responses could be dimming the lights or turning on music, depending on where the objects being tracked were.
Imagine the room had a set of bright green pillows. The camera, mounted on the ceiling, would capture wherever the pillows were placed. If the pillows were all located in one area, a projector above would shine nice bright light on that spot, imagining that a person was sitting there reading on the pillows. If one of the pillows was in the northwest corner of the room, the music would turn on at a low volume. If more pillows were added to that corner, the volume would go up on the music. Other uses for the pillows could be imagined.
We considered using other objects as well, like a cup that would be brightly colored and depending on how close it was to t he person in the room, the temperature would change or if you had a book near you, the light on you would be brighter versus when you had a pillow and blanket with you, which would dim the light.

Another idea was to create a space that would provide a friend to the user. We thought of how children reacted in a dark space and what they would need. Most of all, we focused on relieving their anxiety about the dark by creating a "friend" for them to play with. Our friend could take a few different forms and was projected down on the floor by a projector on the ceiling. One was of a blob-like creature that could be pet and interacted with. The user could walk up to it slowly and crouch down to encourage the blob to interact with them. This motion could be detected by two cameras, one on the ceiling detecting where on the floor the user was and one on one of the walls detecting the posture of the user. A soft, carpet-like flooring would encourage this interaction as well by being pleasant to touch. The other friend idea was that of a set of footprints that the user could play tag with and chase around the room as if it were another person. The footprints could change colors from pink to a light blue to signal when it was playing and when it was just walking along with the user.

The last idea is the hardest to implement and involves the use of hanging fiberoptics. Using the idea of predicting motion, we wanted to create a space where the hanging fiberoptics would light up depending on where the user intended to move. A camera could detect this by seeing how a person moves just before making a motion and exaggerating it in the opposite direction. When a person goes to take a step forward, they always move back slightly, giving them a smooth motion. This is what makes people not seem like robots when they're moving. Robots don't have this kind of motion. When the user starts to move, the hanging fiberoptics around them would react and light up in the direction that the user was intending to move. Because the fiberoptics would all be hung at different heights, they would create a dynamic swirl of light around the user.

These are just some of the ideas we developed over the course of our first ideation session. Look forward to next post!