Friday, December 4, 2009

MX project two final

In lieu of screen grabs of my site Click Here


What I hoped to Achieve for this Site:
For this site I wanted to create an experience that was unlike any interactive web experience currently available. I also wanted to think about interaction in a different way, and eliminate the need for clicking.
Rational for the Design Decisions I Made:
So I made the decision to use the webcam so that the user can directly interact with the site. They are really playing with the site, not just mousing around, I feel like this creates a more immersive interactive experience.

What you Learned Through This Process:
Through this process I learned that it is really difficult to create that experience. Whenever you try to do things that people aren't doing it requires a large amount of "jerry rigging" to make them work, until a time when these things catch on and they start to build functionality like this in to the programs as a standard.

What I am Most Proud of:
I got it to work damnit! It isn't great, but it really works.

What I Struggled with Most:
Getting it to work, and trying to do my own work while also trying to help everyone. I have a really hard time saying no when people ask me for help because I really learn a lot solving other peoples problems. It's a great learning tool. It was really hard though to do that and still get my own done, especially if I was in the middle of something then had to stop, because restarting always takes a long time to re-remember what I was doing. Ugh.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

MX: 94-103

I don't really know what to say about thisy here readin'. It was a history lesson on the screen.

I wrote down that "the screen has become the the main source for accessing information of any kind."...Yeah. I would have to agree. It's the screens ability to be fluid that makes this so. There is no other media available that can do the multitude of things a screen can, thus making it the easy and default method of interaction. The author talks about the difference between real space and screen space. The screen becomes a mask for the important things and eliminates the unimportant things. These things we assume the existence of beyond the screen space, but block them out as unimportant. However, it is often in movies that the important action is the action not being seen. In film for example (and this is an art that is largely lost today) directors would choose to NOT show a gruesome action that happens outside screen space, but rather imply the action. This gruesome action is the focal point and gets filled in by our imagination in real space. Hmm...so through omission screen space and real space collide? I think the author gives way to much credit to VR. With the advent and embrace of the internets VR has been largely forgotten simply because it really doesn't offer anything better. Why would it be better for my entire field of vision to be taken up when accessing any computer content as apposed to just having a flat rectangle in front of you. I think the return on investment just wasn't there to justify any further serious engagement in VR technology, hence its demise. Also, the light pen in the example for the radar seemed more of a precursor to the stylus which then got put on the back burner and replaced by the mouse. This seems like a strange step backward. We still click a physical mouse button that in turn causes the click of a virtual screen based button, where as a stylus would have allowed for a single click as apposed to this strangely overlooked mouse double click. I just plain don't like, I don't like it at all.