What is a Capstone?

I’ve been blessed by being forced to explain Capstones to family members as I’ve been talking to them about what I’m working on. I see it as a Masters Thesis sort of project; something to prove that you’re worthy of graduation. It’s a way to show off everything you’ve learned during your time as a student: both technical aptitude and modes of thought. It’s why the idea of making a web site as the Capstone project being a bad idea makes sense: a website can show you technical aptitude in both coding and design, but a website is a simple thing to think of. It limits your creativity to a known entity with hard-set standards and expectations.

I’ve found myself to be a competitive person recently, so I also see Capstones as a way to show that you’re the best soon-to-be-graduate at whatever field or task your Capstone encompasses. For a field that demands creativity, that means both creativity in the final product, as well as creativity in how you got there. IRIS made a good capstone, because he made a 60 minute video as a student, and working out a process to complete that on a student’s schedule in 4 years requires creativity. Chauncey’s smell-o-vision made a good capstone because he willed it into existence from science fiction and “World of Tomorrow” sort of ideals, and finding a way to do that requires creativity.

I think the idea behind the two semesters for Capstones is partly a reaction to the increasing scale of the projects. A good website could reasonably be brainstormed, designed, and produced in a semester.When people want to make amazing things, 5-ish months is not a reasonable amount of time for the whole process. Also, the longer the time-frame, the easier it is to make changes when problems show up. When you’re presenting your Capstone in a week, any problems that don’t break the project have to stay. When you’re presenting the Capstone in 10 months or so, you can make adjustments to your design to either solve or reduce the impact of challenges that arise.

Capstone Ideas

My initial Capstone idea is a Natural User Interface using Kinect and what I would dub a super-screen. I haven’t yet decided whether it is better to use the Cave or the Video Wall, with the Cave giving physical immersion, and the Video Wall providing higher resolution and fidelity. Currently, the plan is to have the contents of the information be a person’s Social Media world.

One of the twists on this idea I was thinking of was to keep the Kinect and super-screen portion of the idea, and let the function of the interface be to make music, or at the very least sound. The idea came to me while playing Fruit Ninja Kinect on my Xbox. There was a special “sword” that made piano notes whenever the player slashes fruit. Since it used Kinect, there was this strangle tactile feeling of gesturing these broad swipes and having appealing sound play in response. It made me cognizant of how I was slicing the fruit, leading me to change how I sliced to be something that vaguely resembled uncoordinated Tai Chi. Ideally, the screen would respond with color effects akin to a music visualizer.

Another idea would be to take the social concept, but add a twist that would make it very useful to someone who uses social media regularly. Twitter already has a feature called “Who to Follow”, and this would add value. My system would track users who are followed by those that the user follows, and insert the most relevant users into the “stream” with an indicator that they’re not being followed. Relevance would be dictated by both volume of followers (that the user follows) and whether or not the relevant person also follows any of the people the user follows. For instance, if I follow Jeff, Fred, Mike, Sally, and Alison, and they all follow George, George’s tweets would start appearing in my feed. His tweets would appear more if George also followed any of the original 5. This idea is influenced in part by Klout, a social game that shows a social user’s “influence” and shows people you influence.

Another angle would be to use the Video Wall, to make an Art Application Art Installation. It would be a handful of little “tech demos” of simple artisitc applications. The two that are coming to mind are a sketch image where you could just draw doodles with you hands or fingers (or ‘take a picture’ by scribbling all over the ‘paper’) and a Bas Relief sculpting canvas.

I’m really intrigued by the idea of using the Kinect to make people aware of their body and their movement while providing a “service”, even if that service is simply entertainment.