Project 3: Proxemic Display

Spooky Proxemic

Creating a display that reacts to a users presence. I chose to create a display that could be used in a haunted house or escape room. The goal of the display is to add to the scary and fun experience in these settings by making use of "dark" proxemic interactions [1] in a display. The display needs to attract attention, keep a user's focus and scare them. I focused on designing this proxemic display for a young adult student aspiring to go to veterinary school. Having a persona of someone not afraid of blood and guts let me focus on making my display eerie and frightening in ways that didn't include gore which some users may have found to be a "cheap" scare.

Persona

Katie Wong the Aspiring Veterinarian enjoys fantasy novels and likes to have fun experiences with friends. She thinks blood and guts in zombie movies are a lame way to make things scary.

https://app.xtensio.com/folio/fxfdqri

Setting

The display will generally be in an already spooky environment with generally dim light. A haunted house or escape room can be made to have many different possible settings such as a castle, farm, swamp or prison. I took pictures around my home for inspiration on items to include in the spooky display and also possible locations.

Idea #1 Haunted Mirrors

If you asked someone to create a display in a haunted house, a haunted mirror would probably be one of the common ideas that people think of. I too started with the idea of a haunted mirror since this fits well with the theme of a lot of haunted houses and I was also inspired by some of the mirrors found in my own home.

Mirror Reflection

On reflection of the mirror idea I found that in practical terms it would be a difficult display to create. To create a convincing mirror and pair it with proxemic technology would be a difficult task. When you are having fun in a haunted house you might need a certain state of suspended disbelief, seeing a camera or kinect paired with a mirror might break the illusion of the haunted house.

Idea #2 Security Camera

To break away from the mirror idea I tried to think of various different settings that would be part of a haunted house or escape room but where technology wouldn't be immersion breaking. A prison setting seemed like a great candidate for a haunted house or escape room as it provides a scary atmosphere, has security cameras and technology. Based on the setting of a security room in a prison with multiple displays and cameras I tried to come up with various uses of proxemics to make my display frightening.

Attention Grab

To get people's attention the display creates an overlay effect on what would normally be a regular camera display. The user can just see something odd in their peripheral vision, when they look at the display to see what it is it turns back to normal camera footage of the user.

Jump Scare

Once we have the user's attention and they come close to the display an audio and video cue are used to get them to stay close and focus on the screen. Once the user stays within a close distance for a short period of time the image and audio are abruptly changed to produce a jump scare.

Physical Interaction

Part of the purpose of the display is to get people to interact with it so we can scare them. To do this I added a physical rotation knob that users can adjust. As they adjust the knob a cross fade between different audio tracks that give clues to the person is performed. Additionally the knob effects the transparency of an on screen image clue. Both of these together provide a way to force the user to get up close to the display and interact with it.

Storyboard

Additional drawing of the attention grab and jump scare.

Video Demonstration

A short video demo with explanation of the spooky proxemic prototype.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x0qk2b6f23o2rv/Terrance%20-%20Spooky%20Proxemic.avi?dl=0

Get it!

* Source from https://github.com/tthmok/SpookyProxemic

* Download whole zip from https://github.com/tthmok/SpookyProxemic/archive/master.zip

References

1. Greenberg, Saul, et al. "Dark patterns in proxemic interactions: a critical perspective." Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems. ACM, 2014.