After a few hours talking to iciaiot, we started discussing about quirks we noticed in each other. While I was spinning my pen around my fingers, iciaiott was playing a lot with her rings. Later on, iciaiot explained that she would touch her rings usually when she felt nervous or tired. I then started thinking about a way to represent nervousness and use the fidgetiness of the ring manipulation as a way to calm stress. The experience I imagine would consist of someone using iciaiott’s quirk to quell a stressful situation.
I really wanted to try something with an Arduino and a VR headset so I figured I could use such a setting for the purpose of this assignment.
What I envision is an input device made of an Arduino that would capture the position of the ring on a finger. This would be done through a photocell placed at the base of a finger: the ring would block it if normally positioned. The value recorded by the light sensor would notify the system when the user manipulates the ring: the recorded value would then be a sort of “nervousness” value.
Regarding output, I imagine an evolving VR environment. We saw in class how 360 videos and pictures became new way of capturing the world, but I got surprised that this stream was textured in game engine on a sphere. What if we could play with this sphere shape and distort is? I looked up different shaders and shape distortion algorithms. What I want to do is link the distortion of the textured sphere to the stress of the situation. I would trigger stress with the use of a music and distortion of the sphere, while the movement of the ring would bring back the usual 360 picture, in the same way iciaiot does when getting nervous.
