As you can tell by my former todonnalovebob obsession, I love a good mystery.
Without sounding too worky, some of the best interaction experiences you can create involve a little bit of…. magic…
Here’s a couple of examples of when the mystery and the hunt are all part of the fun:
geocaching looks dull, but in fact its a means of making people explore, and showing them new and interesting things, by means of a GPS enabled treasure hunt. This results in lots of outward bound fun
book crossing is a great big book club. The only snag is, before you can read it, you’ve got to find it. Books are deposited in different hiding places around the world, so that folks can find them, read them, and then hide them away again.
This guy at Goldsmiths is making a musical instument which is controled with the power of your mind.
Ok, so its not making beautiful music just yet, but as the BBC news article points out, the aplications for gaming are obvious. There’s also a great potential for people who can’t use a mouse or keyboard for mobilty reasons.
Can’t see that mind hat/swimming cap being a good look at a gig though. Redesign needed me thinks…
Lisa Smith has created the Cute generator. These blobular objects have (from what I can gather) RFID – chips inside that gather and collect information.
This information is the basis for their physical form, so each character is totally unique to it’s user.
What fascinates me about this gets to the core of what character design is all about. We identify abstract shapes readily – (a blob is an eye, a wiggle is a mouth ect) – because it is human nature to project ourselves onto other things. It makes a lot of sense to me that a character could be used as a form of expression of personal identity.
Check out the flikr set here.
Read more about the project here.
