Week 5 & 6

Jay Sehmbey - Sun 12 April 2020, 6:34 pm

Week 5

I had a rough week 5 because my accommodation kicked everyone out due to rising cases in COVID-19 in Queensland and for safety because of which I couldn't attend either the Tuesday's session or the Friday's session. I had informed my team about this and was trying to keep my communications as quick as possible. My team had communicated with me and had decided that we will be proceeding with the Option-2 for our team concept and individual prototype building part.

Week 6

This week, I had to finish the team part and the individual part of our proposal report. We had decided that I will be doing the problem space/concept part of the report. I had started researching more about global warming and its cause. I was trying to think about what are the different things that we can use or we can inform children about global warming. I found out stuff such as plastic contributes to greenhouse gas emissions at every stage of its lifecycle, from its production to its refining and the way it is disposed of. Meaning that it's not only bad for the ocean and environment, it also contributes to global warming.

After the team part, I worked on the individual part of the report. I read all the feedback again. Kasey had copied all the feedback and put it on our google drive which made things a lot easier.

As we hadn't finalised any input method, my plan for the break is to come up with a system of input, and output response. A system which should be interactive and fun for children. Although it is easier to come up with the output method from the globe of our concept, I will look into different sensors that can be used as well.

week6 proposal-report brainstorming research

Week 4 - Journal

Nick Huang - Sun 29 March 2020, 7:20 pm
Modified: Fri 15 May 2020, 5:05 pm

Online pitch and critique on others’ concepts:

During this weeks’ contacts sessions, we conducted the online pitch activities via Zoom and gave and received feedback via Slack. Although we have switched to the online alternatives, our online presentations have gone well and smoothly. By watching other groups' presentations, we were provided the chance to get a better understanding their initial ideas and concepts. For two days contacts, some novel and engaging ideas were presented! We also gave our critiques to other team’s concepts by trying to give our constructive and specific suggestions.

Critiques on our concept:

After we presented our idea through the pre-recorded video, the teaching team and our peers have given us a lot of valuable and actionable feedback, which was very useful for us to refine our concept. After received feedback from Slack thread, we also organised our team’s zoom meeting to invite Lorna, tutors and our peers to discuss around our concept, so as to provide our team with deeper clarification on what we have and haven’t done well for the initial concept and what can the team concept be further refined. Through this session and these online platforms, and thanks for all the teaching staff and our peers, we gathered a lot of feedback, and detailed summary will be listed below.

Feedback summary:

Some positive ones:

Using human’s body as controller makes interactions engaging and intuitive.
Making the interaction process more acceptable and operational.
Providing users with freedom of control and movement.
Enhancing people’s interests in playing games, especially for those who hate using some physical tokens as controllers.

Some actionable and constructive ones:

Avoiding making users feel fatigued.
Going beyond the screen-based output.
Translating into a non-game space will be more worth exploring.
Exploring other parts of body as the controller.
Considering combining that will educational content.
Combining different gestures to everyday objects and day-to-day life.
Reducing users’ cognitive and memory loads when learn how to interact.
Giving users freedom to select specific body parts to control specific interactions.
Considering physical differences among different user groups.
Exploring to apply same tech and interactions into different contexts.

All the feedback from teaching staffs and our peers have provided our team a clearer way to explore our domain and the problem space. Following the given feedbacks, our team decided to do some desk research around existing solutions and then conducted user research to get to know more about our target users.

Some existing/similar technology in this field we can check out:

Leap motion
Nintendo Wii
Switch Gyro
Xbox Kinect
PlayStation Move
PlayStation Eyetoy
Microsoft Adaptive controller (also gather some ideas around ‘disability support’)

Team progress

In this weekend, our team had 2 meetings to discuss around the feedback we have received and how can we refine our concept as the response to these valuable feedbacks. Based on the feedback we received, we had further discussion about specifying our team’s problem space. After that, we decided to move our focus from only ‘hand gestures’ to different parts of our bodies; to go beyond only focusing on game space; to put our concept into a more day-to-day environment; to explore how to apply this technology into various contexts, to reduce the reliance of system on the screen, etc.

As for our team’s future plan, we suppose to first conduct more research around the related work in our chosen domain, and then go deeper around our team’s domain and individual focus by explore the different solutions under the umbrella of team’s domain and problem space. We also break the team section of the proposal report into different small parts and assigned them to each team member.

Individual progress

Since our team have received a lot of valuable feedback, I spent a lot of time on going through each of them in detail, and discussing them with my team, so as to decide how to elevate our team’s concept to the next level. I organised these valuable feedbacks and summarised them to some implications that we can draw on and take into consideration further.

Apart from that, I also done some research around the existing and similar solutions in our theme. By doing that, I can get a better understanding of our chosen domain, and some ideas about how to make our concept more unique.