Jess Goes Interactive

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August 29, 2005

Aquarium brainstorm

After the last class session my thoughts on this project were fairly scattered, and after visiting the Long Beach Aquarium on Friday they are still scattered. So here goes:

1) On a general note, as I mentioned in class I think that involving the ceiling of the exhibit visually is incredibly compelling. The neatest visual experience I had at the aquarium was standing with my face right next to a twenty foot tall tank looking up and seeing tuna fish swim right down towards my head. (Note: The second most visually compelling moment was looking at the darkened tank of fish who have eye spots that glow in the dark.) Here are a couple of pictures of ceiling art:

(From an exhibit by Dale Chilhuly)

(From artwork in a fancy shoe store)

2) One idea I really liked from last class was that of the robotic fish that teams of people would have to work together to get to swim around a tank. I don't know how complicated we can get in this class, but I found a couple cheap remote-control fish.

First example

Second example. Perhaps we could hack these?

3) Along the lines of neat technology to check out, here's a remote-control boat that's supposed to find out where fish are at (so you don't have to go to all that trouble of experience and intuition). I can't tell if it ever made it to retail, but this looks like it could present possibilities...

4) Lastly, it was brought up in last class that it's pretty impossible to compete with fish at an aquarium. To me this means that our exhibit needs to show something that the audience can't already experience. Two ideas that come to mind are immersive tanks of prehistoric or microscopic sea creatures. Here's an article about an exhibit on prehistoric oceans, though it mainly used fossils, skeletons, and concept art. Here are a couple images of plankton:

Posted by rosenblj at August 29, 2005 08:02 PM

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Posted by: kellee at August 29, 2005 11:45 PM

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