What are you left with, once you take a sense away?

What is the role of the user?
The piece is an attempt to allow the user to try to gain an understanding of what it would be like to be blind/partially sighted. The user will enter an environment, which will be pitch black and the user will also be blindfolded to avoid any possible light.


Following the tutorial we had several questions to ask ourselves about the project:

Who are they?
The users will be several different students from around university. An individual will enter the room one at a time. The idea behind the individuality is an attempt to highlight the lonely experience that many people who have become blind feel.

What is in the space?
- physical objects
- sounds- which will be triggered by pressure pads, at least 5 or more? The sound will allow the person to experience the installation and consequently to become a part of it.

How will we shake up their senses?
We need them to be disorientated before they lose their sight completely. A blind person would be unbelievably confused. Moving objects, moving floor, moving walls, through sound effects?

Is there a dramatic situation?
A dramatic situation would give the piece meaning, it would give the user something to participate in and direction. Through conditional statements the user can progress through the situation, so if they move to somewhere in the room before they go somewhere else they will find out certain information that wouldn’t have been accessible without going to the first position in the room.

Does the user take up an ‘acted’ role?
If a dramatic situation is employed, the user will be an onlooker into the situation, learning information about what has happened and the story behind it, e.g. hearing a life story of a blind person etc. It will consequently be a partially acted role, as they will be basically doing what we want, and only accessing information that we allow them to gain if they imply ignore the piece and walk out, then they won’t have had any interaction, but that is their choice.

Tutorials

We had a tutorial with Peter today and explained our idea regarding the removal of senses. Peter encouraged us to make a decision about what sense we wanted to use and to try to move forward with the idea. During the talk we decided on a statement that would introduce the piece: What are you left with once you take a sense away? This would work much like a film one-liner, giving a slight insight into what the piece is about, but still remains intriguing. Through talking to Peter we realised that we had alot of work to do until we could reach a position where we could outline our final idea. We were still uncertain about which sense we wanted to concentrate on, indifferent between sight and hearing. However, we were sawying towards concentrating on the lose of sight. We realised that in order for this to be an accurate project we would have to talk to a person who had actually lost a sense and how this had effected their life. As a result, we decided that the best course of action was to contact the Royal Institution on the Blind and other charities for the blind.

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Neal Bryant and I am a student at the University of
Westminster. I am currently doing a project into the blind, and in
particular how they experience the world. The project is primarily aimed
at people who have become blind during their life, and how they felt
during that period. I was wondering if you would be able to assist me in
meeting a blind person, who wouldn't mind being interviewed regarding
the issues from above. Any help would be extremely useful and gratefully
received.

Yours Faithfully,

Neal Bryant

At this point we are going to wait for our response from the charities contacted and hopefully move from there. In the mean time we have to research into the blind and try to think of how we could emphasize a loss of sight.

Advancements in Ideas

We had been discussing the idea of losing a sense and trying to highlight this lose in our animation. We were undecided on which sense to concentrate on. Obviously the easiest senses to use would be sight and hearing, but we also considered the idea of using touch, smell and taste.

How would each of these be implemented:

Sight: Either blindfold the user or move them into a situation which is unfamiliar.
Hearing: The user could wear sound reducing headphones, and put into a silent environment.
Touch: A room could be adapted into a room full of different textures.
Smell: An adaption on scratch and sniff which would also incorporate the sense of touch.
Taste: Try and link tastes to emotions/sounds/visions etc.

As i said earlier the easiest to implement would be sight and hearing. As hearing and sight are the most important senses they will be the most effective for a piece. The problem would be how could we highlight this lose of sense and how can we convey the loss to a level that would be true of the actual loss experienced in real life.

The Daisy Chained Magnetic Funness!!!

After experimenting with the IPAC card, Alberto and i decided that the best soltuion for the previous task set was to keep the flash side of it fairly simply, and get to grips with the Ipac car. As a result we decided on a simply animation that included a arrow moving around a compass that would be triggered by both the arcade button and also the magnet.



We used a simple code:

on (keyPress "c") {
gotoAndPlay(2);

}

on (keyPress "x") {
gotoAndPlay(41);

}

This code just corresponds an IPAC input to a key press, then once this has been 'triggered' a different frame is played within the movie clip. Within the movie clip there was a simple motion tween, moving the compass hand from one position to another around the compass. The keyPress 'c' corresponded to an arcade button and the 'x' keyPress corresponded to a magnetic switch.

The Nintendo Wii

The Nintendo Wii has recently won the BAFTA for innovation and has also won several other awards throughout the course of the year. The Wii remote has definitely taken both technolgy and the idea from earlier forms, such as the Nintendo's light gun for duck hunt, Power Glove and also from arcade games (using a gun to shoot rather than a controller, using a platform for a skateboard/snowboard/ using a plastic sword to swing rather than a controller).
Its interesting to see that the Wii is regarded as innovation considering the ideas are years old. In this instance the innvovation has been to take such a technology and apply it to something that could be sold on a huge scale, and that would appeal to the user.

The IPAC Card

We have been looking at using IPAC cards today, which is a card that can be plugged into a computer to replicate a keyboard. From this different sensory equipment e.g. pressure pads, or arcade buttons, or magnetic sensors. This can allow animations to use several different methods of input, which takes away the standard use of a simply keyboard and a mouse. An IPAC card consquently allows an animation to be triggered by a user without them knowing, taking it to another level that goes alot further than pressing a button and something happening as a result.

We were set the task to create an animation using the Ipac card, to include a daisy chain i.e. more than one input and to include a magnetic input.

Remediation

Remediation is the evolution of new media from old media.