DSDN 112: Solidifying An Idea

 So, for my interactive experiment, my first project, I'm looking at creating an interactive project that combines the senses of touch and vision.

In my head, I have this idea for something that plays with visual preconceptions. Our visual sense is deceived on a daily basis. We look at computer screens, photos, and see a world that looks 3_d but only exists in two dimensions. We use touch more than ever to verify what things are real. So I wanted to toy with the idea of somebody seeing something I've made and creating an idea in their head of what it feels like, and then actually touching it and being surprised.

My first iteration of this concept was a little prototype I called "thornmail", after a few armour types I've seen in video games and the like. In a way, it doesn't deceive one's vision. It is what it is. It's sharp, and you can only run your fingers one way down it. It feels really cool, and my first idea had to do with this material.

My first idea was to create a box with this material on all the exteriors but one. And then to have an opaque sheet blocking vision into the cube. The idea was that you put your hand into the cube and are then surprised when the inside of the cube is actually rather soft.

However, after consulting with my tutor, I discovered that she thought that by obscuring someone's vision into the interior, you're allowing them to come to their own conclusions about what is actually inside the box. This isn't really a direct deception of the senses as opposed to just obscuring someone's vision.
And she has a point. By not showing people what's inside, they can come to the conclusion about what is inside relatively easy.

So I needed to come up with something better.

I went around the group and asked about their first impressions of the thornmail were. Spiky, dangerous, defensive, sharp, brutal; all of these were common words.

So I somehow needed to create something that looked sharp but really defied that notion when you "verified" it by touch. It needed to be soft, inviting. This would be hard, since metal has an inherently shiny quality which is hard to achieve on other surfaces.

My tutor agreed that direct deception would far enhance the response I was going for with my material. Other ideas that were suggested were filling something soft with things that were very sharp, so that when it was played with, it immediately elicits a response of surprise and shock.

However, the reverse of this idea appealed to me far more. I loved the idea of making something look really dangerous and then having it turn out to be very soft and cuddly. I think this response would generally be more positive, and as stated in Inception, "positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time...", having something negative become something positive would be a far more likeable result.

And so the Spiky Bear was born.

And that's going to be my model! Hopefully it'll work. Hopefully.