the journey continues!

After a recent workshop organised by Jonathan Wardle I was clearer about my idea and this workshop made me realise that I had to first choose an audience before focusing anymore on this project.
The design concept sounded good but what about the content?? What would it be a game for a mass audience, an installation??? More importantly what was is the purpose of it?
i made notes from this lecture and I share some of it with you as I think this day workshop opened some closed doors for me!!

One quote that engaged me most was : shorten and tighter ideas always work better” this was the problem with my idea, I had all these ideas but it was too open, I had to narrow it down and this could be a complex and time consuming process and sometimes you just realised it was even worth all the effort… back to the start! Come up with a new idea.

One exercise that I found useful was mixing up words and see if you make a sentence out of it that would mean something, you could do the same thing when you coming up with an idea, put different elements together and see if they work.

Audience is the most important part of this project, without one you not going to get anywhere and this is what I realised with my idea… first how I can obtain the equipment? What was the purpose?

I cam up with another idea using the same design concept but s different approach… as there are a lot of talk about the 2012 Olympics I thought I could make an installation to promote events.
The installation would have been a game, quite similar to the basketball game . So if you could use that concept promoting different sports, so imaging if that was in a known public place in London. People passing by would notice and might get involve in playing the game, the camera would detect their movement and operate accordingly, at the end of the game your score will be saved and you will have the option to have your picture saved as a thumbnail that will be stored into a database and later displayed on an image wall with all other individuals who had participated.

how the journey began!

Since finishing my placement I have been thinking quite a lot to produce something that has that WOW factor. To come up with a good idea I have been using all type of tools, I just been typing the word interactive in Google, youTube and all other databases and see what it comes up with. I came across interactive displays, blogs from interactive designers and games… I still wasn’t sure what I really wanted to do. YouTube was the most inspirational source for me as I could see the actual work, I wasn’t just reading about it but I wasn’t sure if my skills and facilities could provide me with enough support in order to create high-tech interactive displays.
In one of the lecture by James Jordan we were introduced to a game that used web-cam in order to detect movements, that games generated new ideas for me to think about, I really liked the thought of the idea of producing a work that operates by detecting physical movement but I wasn’t sure how exactly I was going to use this technology and how I would combine it with the right design concept.
After my first project tuition I realised how much I need to consider about this kind of interactive work. The first thing that came into my head was” am I being realistic about this idea, is it even possible to create a work like that?” the idea that I had my in head was an inspiration from a work that I came across in we-make-money-not-art

This interactive display (Mossalibra by Yaniv Steiner & Ofer Luft ) was designed for a nightclub environment where camera would convert the human gesture into a pixelated icon.
I used the idea of having a camera but instead of turning human’s movement into pixelated art I wanted to created a an instant apple iPod advert look projected on a wall in or outside a night club. In order to create something like that you would need few high-tech cameras that would be able to produce a chroma-key effect but I am not sure if cameras are able to create that instant effect.