Proposal Final

 

Student Name:	Christopher Seymour (08024421)
Module Title:	Major Project in Interactive New Media
Title / Subject matter:	Footsteps (Working Title)
Submission Date:	06/11/2009
Description: Exploring my interest in childhood development i.e. learning skills, the psychology of learning, teaching etc. and my growing passion for interactive media, I wish to develop the theme of play explored in year two as a means to create a learning environment for the lower part of school age (i.e. 5 to 8) years. Employing a programme such as Processing, "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions" (Processing, 2010), for the software and pressure sensitive buttons integrated into a floor mat, the environment will allow the target audience to play a sound/image matching game. This will coincide with a neurological defect known as Synesthesia where people's senses are triggered to match at certain points triggered in their brain i.e. they would smell 'x' when they heard 'x'. Thus creating a simulation where users will hear part of a story and in order to progress through the narrative, react by reacting to images on the interface to make a sound within the environment The Interface is going to be an important factor to the game where each move will rely on footsteps or action. Reaction will play an important part, much like Nintendo Wii and the recent venture from Playstation, 'Move' the user will need to stay focused to be able to progress and not become bored of the application.  The aim would be to so that children of a young age are able to assign sounds with images as well as build on their memory skills , through the understanding that they would need to remember to correctly identify the sounds with a sound they've heard before. A sound will play and the child would then match that with an image on the pad but increasingly becoming more intense, only so much that a child will be able to mentally challenge. Therefore as the application is designated for that particular age group, my application will be designed for a playroom for young children. The design itself should be childish so that they feel comfortable within their surroundings with the ability to relate to their everyday environment at that age. Research, published in an article on synaesthesia by Ramachandran and Hubbard (R&H, 2001), shows that children routinely exhibit cross-modal associates very early in their lives. When presented with auditory stimuli followed by visual ones, infants were found to make preferential mappings of values from one sensory modality to those of the other. With that in mind, I feel as though I should solely concentrate on infants as a learning material as opposed to widening the application so that adults are able to use it as well.
Objectives: -To effectively learn the 'processing' application to the best of my knowledge so that it may be used to undertake this project. -Create a children's application that will be perceived as a game but also act as a piece of leaning material. - Correctly identify and match the audio/visuals to fit into a childlike linear narrative. - Design a custom made floor mat for the interaction between user and application.