Workshop 1: Brainstorming ideas

During our 1st workshop for Interactive Devices, we started our brainstorming session by reading out a booklet provided, which guided us through the fundamentals of a "good" session.

Further on, we used the sticky notes provided to come up with a large number of ideas ( around 40 was the number suggested ). We were also encouraged to "think big", into coming up with ideas which seem close to impossible in terms of achievement. Some of the ideas we came up with are mentioned bellow:

• An interactive lamp
• A virtual-projected keyboard for tablets
• A pet drone
• A projection on top of a car's windshield, which could be useful to display GPS arrows
• A "wearable assistant", which could wake people up based on personal timetables
• Kinect as a security device
• Color changing phones, based on battery usage
• A candy-firing gun
• Augmented reality windshields

A member of the BIG lab from Bristol University was assigned at this stage to criticize our ideas and help us refine the good ones. After discussing what we managed to come up with, our next objective was to select two of our ideas and expand on them, in order to present them in front of the cohort. We also had to sketch mock-ups of the products.

As it can be seen from the picture above, our first idea revolves around the idea of projecting notifications on a foggy surface. We chose fog since it has constant velocity and trajectory. Therefore we can use two "guns" to fire and intersect fog clouds, which will then form the base where we will project the notifications. One interesting property of fog is that it dissapears after a while, so it makes sense to project notifications on it. This idea is the decision to morph together two of our previous ideas, the one which involved the candy gun and the one with the smart lamp, which was able to follow the user around.

The second idea we proposed was to help people recognize when someone they like has mutual feelings. We would use a health-tracking device to monitor the person's vitals, such as blood pressure, and also close-proximity technology, such that when people on the street would find each other attractive, the devices would know and notify them of a match.

Finally, all of the groups presented their ideas, and everybody's ideas seemed to be very clever and interesting.

We are really excited since next week we will be playing around with lots of tech kit, which we will probably end up using in our projects.