Dephemeral: Note from today’s class

Project dephemeral (https://courses.media.mit.edu/2014spring/mass62/dephemeral) aims to capture and store ephemeral senses (e.g. smell and taste) in form of digital data. Through this, we hope to achieve duplicating, replaying, and transferring such fleeting experiences.

However from today’s discussion, we start to explore the fictional situation where every senses can be captured and replayed, and eventually making those experience devalued as they can be easily duplicated and replayed with computers. People will less appreciate scent of a flower or a wine, which defeats the purpose of this project to enrich the experiences.

Therefore we are looking to find the exact form of this technology that have a balance between enriching the senses within digital communication and letting us still value the ephemeral experiences. In addition to this, we started exploring the idea of bridging the attributes (that changes over time) of physical objects and worlds into the digital – such as materials decaying over long period of time, materials changing properties over time, and so on.

References:

http://www.amazon.com/Remembrance-Things-Past-Volume-Budding/dp/1561633240

http://www.snapchat.com/

Jim Hollan’s work on digital paper

Notes from today’s discussions

Avatar

Project members: Miles & Evan

This is an experiment with simulated face-to-face communication using procedurally animated avatars. Our project will not only focus on the character overlay system, but also on translating physical attributes to character animations. We are hoping to derive these attributes from portable sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, heart rate monitors, etc…so that this experience can be taken anywhere, unlike cameras and depth sensors.

Here’s a link to our project video.

Master Builders

Team Members:

Hye Soo Yang

Jili Huang

Ricardo Alvarez

David Lobser

Isabelle Alles

Gal Sasson

Omer Shapira

Comments Session 04/11/2014

We started reviewing our project by discussing the parts for which we feel strongly about, particularly about letting people participate on urban/architectural design as our core function. This has several facets:

1. Let people “feel” the proposed designs and observe their behavior in a non-intrusive manner;

2. Allow people to interact and propose changes to pre made  designs using superpowers (simple set of superpowers such as push and rotate for example, other powers such as fly we deemed too complex as an experience and we’ll decide later);

3. Allow multiple users have co-design sessions simultaneously.

Important: We’re not making a professional’s tool, but more of a interaction/design platform for everyone.

Our project should also allow for VR/AR switching in order to enable design sessions for different scenarios. We talked on how important is in some instances to actually go to a place and experience the design “on-site” because of the additional sensorial information and place anchoring effect this has.

We agreed that we we’re going to take it step by step because of the complexity of the project. For this we’re going to work on:

1. VR experience (solo);

2. VR design (solo);

3. AR experience (solo);

4. AR design (solo);

5. Simultaneous multi-users;

6. Expand superpower uses.

We’ll be exploring parametric design as a way for playing with design variations. We’ll be proposing a sample of a few design parameters with which we can start experimenting.

Some of the next steps are described below:

Description:

A shared VR/AR environment where people can co-design their environment with superpowers, while having fun…!!!!

Video Link:

https://vimeo.com/90864195

Additional support images:

Typical Static Urban Planning Design:

Some functionality/design principles:

Typical Static Urban Planning Design Board

Enjoy…!!!

Dephemeral

Video:

https://vimeo.com/90824820

Description:

Smell and taste are the most primitive senses, and are intimately tied to our experiences. Yet, they are elusive and fleeting. We thought about how we could store, recall and share these senses digitally. Could we analyze the chemical composition of a food item, and store that data in digital format? If we had that information, what kinds of experiences could we create?

Consider for a minute that food we bought in the supermarket is merely a programmable vessel waiting to be coded with the perfect flavor. People take photos to capture a moment in time, so that their memory can live forever. Research shows that smell is directly linked to memory, and scents can trigger forgotten experiences from the past. How about a picture that could store our memories in a more meaningful way? In the real world, people interact with each other and share experiences over food. Could we have these types of experiences, even when we are far away? Experiences are ephemeral, but they might not have to be.

Group Members:

Ermal Dreshaj

Xavier Benavides

Judith Amores

Sang Leigh

Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao

Midterm Project Assignment

They should be considering specific design specifications

• symmetry vs asymmetry

• granularity

Human-human interactions mediated by technology

Create vision video that should inform and illuminate a direction for how human to human interaction might evolve as technology develops. This can be a long term direction.  You will draw on these ideas when doing your final (implementation) projection.