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Capstone 1
Research Methods and Professional Practice
The purpose of this class is to employ various research methods in order to come up with a capstone project proposal by the end of the semester.
Goals
Our first assignment was to set goals for this class and our portfolio. We also set goals for ourselves in our personal, professional, and creative realms over the next four years. And finally we were asked to come up with a title and bio for a biography of ourselves 10 years from now. This was a challenging assignment, but I think it was very helpful in beginning to focus and build ideas for this course, the capstone project proposal, and eventually my future career and lifestyle.
Strategic Planning
After coming up with a wide variety of goals, we were asked to narrow down our selection to the three goals that would have the biggest positive impact on ourselves.
I chose:
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To get my health issues under control
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To live in a beautiful place that supports my active outdoor lifestyle after graduation
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To be financially independent after graduating college
These goals seem most important to me. The next part of the assignment was to come up with small, easily attainable steps to reaching these three goals. Our challenge then is to gradually add these small steps onto out to-do lists each week so we can begin a real effort to reach these goals. This week, I will be making a call to my doctor, researching cities that I may like to live in, and updating my resume. Each of these steps puts me a little bit closer to reaching each of my three goals.
Research and Design Sprint
This was a group assignment where we were tasked with researching and designing a solution for a particular randomly generated problem. Beekeeping was the random prompt we were tasked with and our solutions are visible in the slide show document linked below.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CKDqQV_TYG7HJ928q-sbuulrieXe8Tyg8B1Ovpw2ErE/edit?usp=sharing
Introduction and Re-Introduction
In our capstone class we were asked to introduce ourselves during the first week of class and then re-introduce ourselves toward the middle of the semester in the context of our capstone projects and what we wanted to do for them. The main purpose was to find potential group mates for our final projects that had similar interests and helpful skills.
Case Study
For this assignment, we began doing research in the area we were interested in creating a project for. My research is centered around the question "How can physical computing and projection mapping be integrated to create a more immersive viewer experience"? There is a link to my complete case study document following the abstract as well as some relevant images.
Abstract :
As television, movies, video games, and other forms of digital entertainment become more commonplace in modern society, people will reach for a more immersive experience to provide entertainment and an escape from the everyday. A possible solution to this need for more immersive entertainment could lie in the combination of projection mapping and physical computing. By combining these two technologies, viewers would be able to be immersed in video projected into a physical space and also interact with physical objects in the space that affect the video projection. This crossover between the two technologies allowed for a kind of virtual reality in the physical world. I am interested in using these two technologies as immersive art installations.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qwfx1BaJs9XlcvLiJqYU1cQljTsSeTq-NYtJXSync8w/edit?usp=sharing
Idea Validation and Mini Pitch
In this assignment, we were asked to define a project idea and conduct research among possible end users as well as experts in our specific fields to validate the idea we came up with. Here is a link to the document explaining my idea and relevant research followed by the slides I used in my mini pitch to explain my idea and next steps.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OlaekaYWP5kraN-htYtUVZlIzYgX-f_AFx40e6TjMi8/edit?usp=sharing
Prototypes
The next step in developing my capstone project idea is making sure it will actually work. In this assignment, I did some more hands-on research by creating prototypes to test specific aspects of my project idea.
I started with connecting physical plants to an Arduino to control a light based on human touch. You can see in the video below, that as the hand gets closer to the leaves, the small red light gets brighter and brighter, reaching its maximum brightness when the hand touches the leaf. I imagine repeating this process on a large row of plants. As the user walks by or reaches their hand out, EL wire attached to each plant will glow brighter as the user passes. This will be a meaningful relaxation interaction because it will help the user to feel more connected with nature and bring the outdoors into the relaxation space.
For my next prototype, I used Processing to create a relaxing water ripple sketch. In this sketch, the user clicks with the mouse or taps on a touch screen to make a ripple-like ring appear. The ring grows up to a certain size and then disappears. Ideally I would like to project this onto the floor in one section of the installation.
This is the sketch projected onto the floor:
Most of the interactions that affect the projections will involve capacitive touch. In the following example you can see a project I made that uses that technology. The light projected onto the hand changes colors as the viewer touches the sculpture. This piece was shown in a gallery and I was able to see how people interacted with it. The public response was very positive so I defiantly want to use this kind of interaction in my capstone project.
Final Presentation
Below you can see the slides of my final presentation and there is a link to my proposal document.
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