Project Description

Here is the project description we will send to Lisa and Michael.


Project description


The Group

We are a group of four, two of each gender and three different nationalities.

Bo Hagen (Danish)
Camilla Hägg (Finnish)
Kolbrún Ósk Halldórsdóttir (Icelandic)
Magnús Sveinn Jónsson (Icelandic)


Initial Thoughts and Global Problem Formulation

For our Bachelor project we decided we wanted to work with immersive feedback. We are interested in finding new ways to give feedback from games and we came up with this global problem:

How can we make use of alternative feedback that isn't visual in nature but will create a more immersive experience?

Our first thought was to make a vest that has built in speakers that give feedback from the game. The speakers could be used not only to give auditory feedback but the vibrations from the different frequencies of sound could affect the user and give him information about the development of the story game or the playable characters.

After discussion of this idea we realized that the speakers that we would be able to fit into a vest could perhaps not output the low frequencies that are most likely to give tactile feedback to the user. The idea of putting a big speaker into a chair and having the user sit there was born from that discussion. The combination of the vest and the chair might not be the most suitable one, but it is the starting point of our further investigation into this field.

Initial Problem Formulation

Thinking even further we realized that we are also very interested in alternative input for games, and perhaps even input that the player is not completely aware of or in control of, e.g. the heartbeat. It could be used to control certain aspects of the game and by that try to make the user more in tune with the game and immersed in it. The output could also be controlled to some extent by that input, for example outputting a heartbeat in a speaker close to the heart which is a bit faster than the users heartbeat, trying to get the user more excited.

From the discussion about not only alternative outputs but also inputs we came up with this initial problem formulation:

How can we use bodily functions to provide a more immersive experience through physical feedback?

This is the starting point for our research in the pre-analysis that will eventually bring us to the final problem formulation and enable us to start working on the product. The deadline for the pre-analysis is the 2nd of April.

Group 606.