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.