Assignment 01a Week 4 Presentation Scripts

Inspiration
Three primary cases that inspired our team for the Lullaby Project:-

1. William W. Gaver - Telegotchi
2. Shep Korvin - Weather Flower
3. Bill Gaver and Heather Martin - Worry Stone

Ultimately, these three distinctive project demonstrate different aspects in the field of tangible media and our team have closely examined each project's unique input/output systems to further develop our project Lullaby.

Telegotchi
Telegotchi is a version of the popular children’s toy (Tamagotchi) with no buttons (below). In the long run the goal would be to rely on psionic communication alone to keep the little virtual creature happy.

Our Lullaby follows such ambiguity of relationship by developing a toy, which responds to the player's audio inputs and react via tangible, audio and visual outputs. Our project's focus is not to rely on traditional keyboard or mouse input; instead we aim for a far more ambiguous input system similar to the ones demonstrated in Telegotchi. At this initial stage of our project development, our primary input system would focus on vocalisations.

These two project concepts share the same personal interaction between the device and the player. Furthermore there are emotional as well as tangible attachments in both devices.

Weather Flower
This project is an impressionistic display of a virtual weather flower. Similar to how real world flowers feed on water and dirt, virtual flowers, on the other hand, feed on climate data from a real world location. The data received affects the physical appearance of the flower.

The soft aesthetics of these sorts of displays seem well-suited for domestic environments; perhaps less demanding than more precise information, but it permits a degree of ambiguity that might encourage imagination and speculation.

An important fact to note is that this weather flower project is only a non-interactive ambiguous visual display; our project Lullaby is similar but instead of being just an ambiguous visual display, we are creating a tangible media that is aimed to be interactive between the device and the player.

Worry Stone
Worry Stone is basically an electronic to-do list that uses its processing power to endlessly and visibly rehearse entries. By taking on the fretting of the user, the intention is that it should free time for less neurotic activities. This proposal takes an appropriate use of digital technologies to perform tasks that are onerous for humans.

Our Lullaby toy demonstrates such potential - not to offload a player's worries but to stimulate player's emotions and allowing them to externalize their emotions. For instance, the player could display their true emotions in front of the Lullaby toy and the toy would respond accordingly. The player would obtain feedback if their attitude was too strong or too emotional - then they would be able to readjust their emotions before they encounter another human being. This also helps the player to let out their anger when, for example, they have to enter an important meeting.