« March 2005 | Main | September 2005 »

August 31, 2005

Things for fun...

During class I mentioned that I liked playing games with the little specks of dust in my eyes. Here are some other examples of games I play with my eyes:

While sitting in the front seat of a car, I would notice a bit of dirt on the windshield. With my focus on the road ahead, the bit of dirt looks like two bits of dirt…which I would move in relation to the road sweeping by. Common games would be maintaining as narrow a course as possible, slaloming between lane markings, or simply imagining they were part of the focusing mechanism of some abstract camera I was wielding to record the information between the marks…

The specks of dust. I like just going through the motions…arcing from right to left, continuously. That’s just fun. The afterimages always struck me as interesting.

The “area” that’s created when near the corner of some large obstruction, like a wall. Maximize that area by focusing as far away as possible and maneuver around the corner to target various things that I’d identify on the fly.

When my sister was in the car, we’d play various games…and we’d challenge ourselves by playing them without the board. Quickly jumped from Tic tac toe to Connect Four to Chess (where we would hardly ever finish a game because there’d be some argument over where some piece was located, but it was stil fun…) Much more fun because there was nothing to see…

Posted by diamante at 05:30 PM | Comments (2)

August 30, 2005

Drawing...




Click for the whole thing...

Posted by diamante at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

Swimming a Fish

The idea I had for "swimming a fish" was inspired by a memory I had of a Pterodactyl flying simulator installed at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I tried my darndest to find a picture of this thing on the net, but it looks like my memory and poor drawing skills are going to be the things here.

Basically, the proportions were very similar to your standard arcade machine, except the monitor was very small (perhaps about 12-14 inches) and the control panel consisted of a very thin isoceles triangle that rotated around its base: from the pointing up position, it could be turned smoothly about 45 degrees in either direction.

The screen showed only two things: a view of the virtual pterodactyl from above in the bottom half and the direction of the wind in the top half.

What we had to do was constantly move the triangle so that the on-screen pterodactyl's head would constantly be aligned with the wind. The wind was always changing directions, so to keep balance one would be turning the triangle left to right and back smoothly in about a two second interval. A slight goof and the pterodactyl would quickly fall below the screen's border, only to be replaced by a new one.

So...here, there are a bunch of things we could improve on: the content, the interface, the feedback, and the environment. The regularity of the wind pattern made it a one-minute kiosk. The interface was intuitive to a certain extent, but entirely unexciting. The feedback was limited strongly by the technology of the mid-80s. It was also just one of nearly 2 dozen little kiosks jammed into this "simulated flight" area, making the experience very lonely within the individual activities.

I'll talk about ideas building on this particular inspiration for "swimming a fish" tomorrow. For now: crappy drawing above! Time to break out the tablet.

Posted by diamante at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2005

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquaria..

http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/arts/ss_interactive_environments-en.asp
http://www.mysticaquarium.org/index.cgi/964
http://familyfun.go.com/family-travel/road-trips/feature/famf17aquariumfl/famf17aquariumfl.html

The Mystic Aquarium, for instance is showing an interactive exhibition in which one can explore the bottom of Monterey Bay, a protected site near the Californian Coast. It is a unique experience to see under water... live! The viewer is able to manoeuvre a small remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that allows to see the bottom of the ocean in real time. Next to that, reality TV is nothing!

Also I , not quite but: http://resumbrae.com/vr04/stephenson.pdf

Posted by diamante at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)