Workshop 1 – Brainstorming ideas

During this workshop we gathered together as a group for the first time and discussed the ideas for our interactive device. This workshop was structured to give each of us an opportunity to share our ideas between the group as well as an entire group . First we were all asked to think of up to 10 ideas. This gave each of us a chance to think about and express what we want to achieve by the end of this unit. However, it was quite hard to come up with these ideas when put on the spot. Nevertheless I proposed the following three ideas:

• Tangible surface – a surface made up of an array of thin metal rods which move up or down to form a shape such as buildings or terrain.
• Bat mapper – using a cluster of sonar devices to detect the surrounding environment.
• Mobile control plane – though not much of a challenge, the idea was to build up on existing remote control devices and enable them to be controlled over the internet.

We then all shared our ideas with the rest of the group and categorized them by the devices they would be using. This was a quite challenging as the ideas ranged from something as simple as a mobile controllable plane to something as ambitious as teleportation. Having categorized our ideas we then filtered the list down to just the following 10 ideas:

1. Bat mapper
2. Tangible surface
3. Occulus Rift as an extension to Kinect
4. Wristband to monitor heartbeat, temperature and pressure to change video game dynamics
5. Touch-screen jacket
6. Modifying terrain through vibration/electronic impulses
7. Tablet and TV interaction with Kinect - using eye tracking to scroll webpages on TV and gestures to move between pages for books
8. Smell output from games
9. Water clone/water pressure jetpack
10. Hologram which could be moved in the space and resized

We then further narrowed the list down to 2 ideas only. This was quite challenging as we had few good ideas and some of the team members felt strongly about couple of ideas. We overcame this challenge by discussing uses and complexity related to each device. The final 2 ideas, their uses and and diagrams are mentioned in the group post.