We’re in full design-mode now, and this week was all about attacking the problem from different angles. We came up with three different ways to attack the problem.
- The perspective of the performance.
- The perspective of the “problem-space”.
- The perspective of emotion-first.
We sat down with Judy Choi, a researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction department here at Carnegie Mellon University to discuss the project. We thought she might have insight into the idea of putting VR on a stage. While discussing, she challenged us to view the deliverable from the perspective of creating empathy for a performer.
Then we took the advice of our client and took the opportunity to look at the project from the perspective of creating a problem-space. We tried to find the question we wanted to answer, or at a minimum, the specific idea we wanted to explore. We came up with three general categories of interest.
- Empathetic Intensity – How does a person’s ability to empathize fluctuate based on their experiences?
- Group vs. Individual Response – How does an individual multiply or dissociate their experience from a collective’s?
- Reciprocal Empathy – How does one person’s empathy towards another reciprocate back the other direction?
Lastly, at professor Brenda Harger’s advice, we decided to try to pick a specific emotion to explore. We looked at the benefits and limitations that naturally come with virtual reality, and developed a broad list of possible emotional spaces.
Our goal for next week is to bring everything together and have a finalized idea to present at our quarters review for the faculty in two weeks.
