Bierro-PortraitPlan

After a few hours talking to iciaiot, we started discussing about quirks we noticed in each other. While I was spinning my pen around my fingers, iciaiott was playing a lot with her rings. Later on, iciaiot explained that she would touch her rings usually when she felt nervous or tired. I then started thinking about a way to represent nervousness and use the fidgetiness of the ring manipulation as a way to calm stress. The experience I imagine would consist of someone using iciaiott’s quirk to quell a stressful situation.

I really wanted to try something with an Arduino and a VR headset so I figured I could use such a setting for the purpose of this assignment.

What I envision is an input device made of an Arduino that would capture the position of the ring on a finger. This would be done through a photocell placed at the base of a finger: the ring would block it if normally positioned. The value recorded by the light sensor would notify the system when the user manipulates the ring: the recorded value would then be a sort of “nervousness” value.

Regarding output, I imagine an evolving VR environment. We saw in class how 360 videos and pictures became new way of capturing the world, but I got surprised that this stream was textured in game engine on a sphere. What if we could play with this sphere shape and distort is? I looked up different shaders and shape distortion algorithms. What I want to do is link the distortion of the textured sphere to the stress of the situation. I would trigger stress with the use of a music and distortion of the sphere, while the movement of the ring would bring back the usual 360 picture, in the same way iciaiot does when getting nervous.

Arduino input device sketch
Example of shader I want to try to distrot the scene