A Glorious End and a New Beginning

A lot has happened since my last post. I think the all of the presentations last Monday went really well. Everyone was nervous but I think we all pulled it off! It was great to see people’s ideas presented and it’s a fantastic skill to develop.

I presented the website and demos I created for the project - www.sensorysubstitution.co.uk. Please have a look and feel free to give me feedback. I’ve already had some feedback from a user of the vOICe software who emailed me. It’s always great to get any feedback on a site you’ve created, be it good or bad.

We’ve had the new brief this week; it’s called “Design for Interaction”. I’m still at the research stage of this brief, looking into many different ideas.

Experimenting with input and output devices for computers seems to be the main theme which most people are currently looking into. Pressure pads, buttons and sensors are all very interesting ways of interacting with something but I think I need to focus on what they will be interacting with for this project. There is a lot to consider and Flash seems to be the most obvious software option for interactive design (maybe a bit too obvious?). I hope that next week I will get a chance to speak with some of the tutors and discuss some of the initial ideas I have.

Anyway, enough jibber-jabber, here are some videos I’ve found which are helping me formulate initial ideas:

Human-Joysticks



Drumming Robot



Emotional Robot Head

Deadline

Well this will be my last blog entry before the deadline for the Design Futures project. I’ve been working hard trying to pull everything together. I have however, managed to catch a cold, which has made things harder!

I’m currently finishing off my presentation and organising all my work so that it’s easy to look through. I have really enjoyed this project, especially the freedom to research and experiment with ideas.

I wish everyone luck with finishing their work and their presentations on Monday. I’ll see you all then.

Wikinomics and Testing

After our discussion last week on Wikinomics I’ve been thinking of ways to integrate some sort of community/collaborative elements into my project. I think that allowing users of Sensory Substitution software and hardware to join a community to share their experiences and offer each other information and tips may increase “qualia” (emotional attachment to images). This, in turn, may contribute to the success and widespread use of Sensory Substitution and related technologies within the blind community.

I’ve also been doing some testing of the vOICe software to try and understand how long it would take a user to learn how to interpret the sounds as images. I’ve found this research very useful. Testing the software has shown me that interpreting these sounds within the brain is like learning a new language so can take some time to fully get to grips with.