WEEK 10: PCOMP PROTOTYPE

INTRO

Last week, Jeff gave our group feedback to incorporate a talisman or a similar type of physical prompt into our project. Our group met to discuss what we wanted the talisman to look like and ended up revamping our idea.

We had many parts in our project: Neurosky to read brain levels, Kinect to project the body’s silhouette and p5.js animation on the screen to showcase feelings of anxiety and peace. Our story was becoming convoluted, mixing many themes together so we decided to simplify our story.

STORY AND USER FLOW

As a user, there are many components in the external environment which can influence how you view the world. We can become distracted by these outside influences, so sometimes it’s good to be mindful and focus on the task at hand. 

For our project, that translates to changing from one state to another or your default state to your concentration state. Users will wear a Neurosky headset where the change from the default to concentration will be registered as brainwaves. We would visually map this change of state as a cloud of smoke, default state, to a silhouette, concentration state. To engage users we incorporated the story of catching fireflies. Users will hold a mason jar and “catch” fireflies on the projected screen. As you “catch” fireflies, or close the lid over the jar, LED lights in the jar will turn on and the jar will vibrate to indicate you’ve caught something. We will also use the unscrewing of the lid as a switch on to start the screen projection. 

User flow part 1

User flow part 2

After creating our user flow, we brought down the components of our flow in more detail. We sketched out the dimensions of the mason jar, the schematic for all our wirings and overview of all the channels we would be using for our project. 

Mason Jar

Schematic and Kinect, p5 and Neurosky channels

MATERIALS

We determined the materials we already had and created a list of what we needed. Here is our link to our bill of materials.

To help plan our project overview, we created a Trello project management board. We also used the Trello board to map out our timeline week by week.

Week by Week Trello Project Management.

USER INTERACTION QUESTIONS

The main question we had for the class :

1. How do you think users can be prompted to concentrate when staring at a screen.