After getting settled into our work space for the semester, the team got cracking on answering the important question: what exactly is our project? We know our project deals with some combination of neuroscience and virtual reality, but that could mean just about anything.
One of our first steps was to speak with our academic advisers, Jessica Hammer and Dave Culyba, about their expectations of the project. Quickly we realized that before we could begin any design work on our project, we first needed to get an understanding of the breadth of the field of neuroscience. None of us have any prior expertise on the subject, so we didn’t even know enough to know what we didn’t know.
To solve this problem, we broke the broad academic subject of neuroscience into research segments:
Each team member took one of the six sub-categories and did independent research to bring back to the group. When we came back together, we were able to share the essentials with the team. It was a great way to get everybody up to speed on some of the different ways we could approach the topic. We discovered that senses, illusions, and suggestion were rich topics with a lot to explore. On the other hand, things like dreams and consciousness were too difficult, and aging and learning were too broad.
Next week, we get to talk with our client Emily Treat for the first time. We look forward to discussing the project with her and discovering what Games For Change wants out of our team.
