My favorite interaction that I remember fondly of is Tamagotchi. Below is a picture of it.
I remember as a kid playing with it a lot. The reason why it felt so special was because it felt like I had a real pet. The interaction that you had with the device is somewhat similar to interacting with a puppy. Moreover, as you take care of the little tamagotchi character, it evolved or even grew up.
Most of the toys that I was introduced to as a kid did not have such factor to it. It was fun to play with it for a while, but there were limited things you could do with them. However, this little device had several different options. You could help it exercise, eat, clean, and even find a friend with someone else’s tamagotchi. This was definitely my favorite interactive experience.
My favorite interaction in life is board games. The way they are made is so simple but there are rules that you have to follow. An example would be a game called “Munchkin”. The game is a tiny version of “Dungeons and Dragons”. The goal of the game is to reach lvl10 (or lvl20 in expansions).
The game is simple and complicated at the same time. You interact with it using a rolling dice and some coins and of course the cards.
There was this quite popular game that came out in 2009 for the playstation called EyePet that my sisters and I used to play a lot. Its a different game from what we usually play in first shooter games, and there is no specific linear story. You must set up the camera in the beginning, and start the game, then a reflection of where you are sitting gets displayed on the screen.
An egg pops up and where interaction with the virtual pet begins and you are able to caress the egg till it hatches and meet your new pet.
The game has a variety of options and different interactions the player (or players) and the pet can do. I don’t usually like these types of games, but for some reason the make up of the virtual pet was very well done, and it also includes facial expressions and reactions to things add to the realistic feeling it has when playing.
A few years ago, a kickstarter showed up for a game called Superhot. It had a mechanic which I’ve never seen before, which I really liked a thought it to be really interesting. The game is a shooter where you have to fight through different set stages, but time only moves when you do. So you can asses the situation without moving and then calculate your moves in order to not die and win the round, however if you look around then the bullets continue flying towards you. It started off as a normal computer game, however it came out around the time VR became popular and the game was perfect for VR, so it incorporated VR too.
Actually there are two interactions I would like to talk about. The first one is a website (showed by Craig in all his classes) that provides an interactive experience. As users access the website via mobile devices, they would be able to make their own paperplane, stamp on it and throw it away. Users could also catch a paperplane, unfold it, see from the stamps where this plane had been, and stamp on it. The design of this experience is quite simple and intuitive. The instructions are quite clear. What users have to do on their mobile devices really resembles what they really have to do if they are making their own paperplane.
The other interaction is from a short video I saw, between a user and a piggy bank. The piggy bank looks like a card box. As the user put the coin on the plate and press it, a cat will sneak its claw out from the box and ‘steal’ the coin away. The interaction is quite simple, but it tells a vivid story of the coin being stolen by a greedy cat.
This was the first interactive film that I know of, designed to be streamed alone or in a small group of people; such an experience could not have the same effect watched in a theater in a big crowd as you wouldn’t feel complicit in the choices you made with the presence of other people. The film is reminiscent of a hypertext novel, in which your decisions fork various paths. There are evidently one trillion different ways your individual film experience can go.
There isn’t too much time in between making a decision that it becomes a typical movie, but it isn’t short enough that there is no room for storytelling through the medium of film. In other ways, the speed of interaction feels just right. There is also a progression to the interactions…with each subsequent decision being more high-stakes. The player is eased into the decisions, which coupled with having enough time for the arc of character development, creates more emotional investment into the outcome they receive. If they reach a dead end, the viewer can go back in time as the whole story is about multiple threads of time and whether one is more real than the other. However, the story becomes altered just as they do. Being able to go back to the last point before it all went wrong furthers emotional investment in the interaction as the viewer becomes struck with the desire to see many, if not all, possible endings–there are evidently five possible main endings for the film, so that is a good number that it is possible to see all five in about two hours, the average length of a feature film. Each decision that the viewer makes has only two possible immediate choices, making it relatively simple for the viewer comprehend what is required for them to interact. If the film was convoluted with the ability to make a decision from even three or four or eight choices, the viewer would probably get exasperated and stop watching or make a random decision reducing the emotional investment in the decisions made.
What I loved most was that the film was really about the appearance of interaction. Though the viewer was empowered to make decisions in the course of the film, they come to the conclusion that they only have the appearance of free will, a realization whose development parallels that of the protagonist. The protagonist similarly realizes that his decisions are being controlled by none other than the viewer. Perhaps, appearance of interaction is phrasing it wrong. Because it is certainly interaction given the media’s various reactions to the choice the viewer makes. Rather, it is that your interaction appears to have consequences but you soon realize the futility of making decisions. The film also raises the theme about whether it is only through insanity that one can realize their true creative potential. From the first decision of what cereal to eat versus one of the last decisions of whether to kill your father or not, Bandersnatch is an engaging interaction. It received much criticism from Black Mirror fans and others who declared that the endings weren’t personalized enough. That is probably well-warranted if you look at it from a critical lens as a film, but as a medium, it raised so many questions about how an interaction is designed to give you the appearance of free will…with other forms of media, the artist usually has an intended interaction for the viewer; there is a specificity to the interaction. It also makes the viewer wonder whether this will change the way that we watch on our screens and the dangers that may come from that in terms of what data is collected from us…when we interact with something, is our interaction a form of input? What could be gleaned by it? And by who?
As someone who used to be afraid of heights as a kid, I felt
really connected to this application as it immerses the user in three different
types of outdoor settings (elevator, skywalk, and a virtually created tower)
with each setting having multiple difficulty levels in order to slowly ease you
into the experience. Usually, I tend to see that most virtual reality applications
are designed for entertainment purposes. However, I am, interested in learning more
about VR experiences with impactful applications that can change someone’s life
for the better, and Cityscapes does exactly this. In addition, the application
has the possibility of pairing up with a Gear S2 to measure the heartbeat of
the user in order to gauge the user’s progress.
In terms of communicating information and composing an attractive
view, the app developers did an outstanding job in simulating a real-life environment
that can actually make the user’s fear of heights be tested in a variety of
ways. As such, I believe that a careful research was done in order to design the
best environment possible, one that takes the user into this simulated world and
lets them leave with less fear after hours of use.
After perusing through different VR titles, I realized that
I want to create one that lets the user interact with non-human entities from
our world. For my 1st project, I created a simulation of a camping
site and I really enjoyed doing so. As such, I would like to continue delving
into the idea of simulating human’s interaction with nature in order to bring
awareness on the impact (oftentimes a negative one) that humans have with
nature and extend the significance this interaction has for the user.
Instagram engagement is no longer just likes and comments, it also includes engagement from your stories to build connections between you and your followers, to encourage your followers to chat and share their opinions and experiences with you and therefore to interact with your viewers to foster the loyalty/stickiness.
A simple interaction I like between two human beings is the way we comment/reply to each other on instagram stories via stories stickers like question/poll and vote stickers. They are easy to use, fast to get response, and the results of the interactions are clearly visualized to be seen.
Here are two examples that indicate how stories sticker increase the Instagram engagement/interaction:
The Question Sticker:
Nothing sparks conversation more than a good AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Instagram Stories. And while influencers have been known to use the question sticker to help their followers get to know them more. It’s also a great opportunity for your followers to get to know yourself or a specific brand better, or get more information about your products.
On the flipside, it’s a great place for you to ask your followers some questions. You could spark a conversation about your VR project inspiration, your next season’s color palette, or what product lines they’d like to see more of. It’s engagement, conversation, and customer feedback altogether and it’s designed to be user friendly for both instagrammer and followers. All you need to do is to drag the bar / comment your ideas at the spot.
Poll and Vote Stickers:
Ask people to vote can make you decision-making much more easier and give your followers a sense of they are participating in your choice making in your life and people are also curios about what other people’s choices are. All they need to do to join the decision making is by simply tap the answer and the portion of each choice will be shown after you make your own choice.
This past winter break, I visited Marpi’s New Nature exhibition at ARTECHOUSE DC, an art gallery that focuses on immersive interactive art pieces.
The part of this particular exhibit that I really liked was a room full of screens, each screen containing a “creature” you could interact with by waving your hand over a motion sensor. The sensor would track your hand, which you could see displayed on the screen with a small hand symbol, the movement of which would get different reactions out of the creature. These also all implemented AI, so the creatures adapted how they reacted to the interactions. Essentially, the way it was explained, the reactions we were getting from the creatures were not the same as say, the reactions the very first exhibition visitors received from the creatures. This video I took during my visit shows just one of the many creatures you could interact with:
I really liked this interaction for many reasons. First, I think the music, lighting, and graphics all complemented each other nicely. The music was very calming yet futuristic in a way, and kind of inspired curiosity. Second, the interaction was very easy to understand. The user’s hand makes a digital hand appear on the screen, which gets an immediate reaction from the creature – it is all very intuitive. Third, it was fun to play with all the creatures in different ways. They were each designed differently – this one just happened to have many balls that would bounce in different ways. I also really liked the use of AI because it made the creatures more “real,” in a sense. They learned, just like real living things do. There was one creature, however, whose sensor didn’t seem to be working properly so the digital hand wouldn’t move the way you wanted it to. However, looking back on it, this could have been on purpose.
I thought chatbots were pretty old and outdated until I *met* Mitsuku last semester as part of another IM class. It was really interesting that this chatbot was in a human form. The homepage states that she’s a “four-time winner of the Loebner Prize turing test, so I gave her a try – or rather, a lot of tries because she actually turned out to be interesting!
Mitsuku’s answers may not always be fitting, but she has a lot of different answers on stock. I find it interesting that this chatbot almost gives an impression of a real person, which makes the conversation more exciting and interesting, regardless of whether the whole content makes sense or not. It’s interesting because you wouldn’t expect such complicated, sophisticated answers from the computer that just isn’t human.
I read a paper a while back that talks about how believable these chatbots have become. Some people have actually started treating these chatbots as their real counselors because of certain traits that they possess. For example, chatbots often repeat some phrases of the sentence that you write, which is what counselors and psychologists often do to turn the conversation’s focus back to the patient/speaker. The preset algorithm makes these chatbots particularly successful in giving the impression that they possess human qualities. I find this human-machine interaction very fascinating and see a lot of potential in developing this field.
