I’ve been considering some of the ideas we discussed at our in-person meeting (Jordan, Alicia, and I).
I think we need a really solid idea of how we want to tie everything together. Just because it’s feasible to have input through large over-sized items doesn’t necessarily mean that the installation will make sense. I’m concerned that it will just end up a chaotic mishmash of direct input through the use of a variety of large, tacky, devices — which I’m not entirely opposed to as I still think it might be fun.
Ideally, it might be more enjoyable if we could come up with ways that users can interact and influence the installation without necessarily moving around objects with sensors in them. For example, if we could use video and sound detection to “sense” where in the room people are gravitating and then capture input from them (strictly text perhaps) we could translate this into less direct input.
Another idea I had was that instead of mixing all of the emotion words together throughout the installation, it could be divided into the 6 (or however many we decide) themes (ie. one wall per “basic emotion”). We could then detect emotions from users simply based on their location within the installation. To make this more interesting, we could trace the shadow of the users on each wall (perhaps using text or some other cool light grafiti in the shape of the person.. the possibilities are endless) and give them the characteristics of that particular emotion.
Example - I come into the installation and I go over to the the “sadness” wall/area that is displaying (in a super-cool-Eric-Chan-way) all kinds of sad words, maybe using shades of sad colours, moving the words around in a sad way.. whatever that is. A camera tracks my movement and projects my shadow (real time) on the wall in amongst the text somehow — for just one idea, see Camille Utterback’s work here. So now it’s almost as though the room is influencing the user, not just the other way around. As far as input goes.. I’m not really sure. We could have the user hold or wear some kind of object as they come in, or leave different objects (even something simple like cubes, spheres, etc. of different colours) around the installation that users can touch. There are also different input forms that we can look at like temperature/touch/motion sensors. We can also have have the standard text input through keyboard/computer or phone — maybe even just limit the users to this and try to extract more emotion information through less direct methods, such as the video captured images (such as colours they are wearing, speed of movement.. it wouldn’t have to be anything super complex). If we were to go this route, I think we could spend a lot of time creating and refining a really cool projection display. We could even explore things like connecting different users by their location, mood words nearest them, type of words they input, colours they are wearing, amount they are moving, etc. Or we might also track user paths through the room to create a sort of inverted light/shadow graffiti.
I definitely want the installation to be fun but I think it will be more impressive if the final presentation is coherent and “clean”. I think it might be more fun for everyone (kids and adults) if the main theme is slightly simpler but also less obvious, while still allowing (encouraging!) everyone to move around and try to manipulate/abuse the system.
