Brain Overload....

Got alot of research now, it's going to take me a full week to read through it all fully and commentate and draw ideas from it. Got loads of ideas just from skim reading things. Alot of the feedback has been really thought provoking too. As has looking at other peoples blogs and giving them feedback. I made one comment about a show called Knightmare that has been echoing in my mind since I made it. The show is about 15 years old, and was about a dungeon master, a fantasy world, and groups of kids who would have quests in the world, which was a VR simulation. One kid would wear glasses and see parts of the wolrd, and his team members would watch on the screen and have acess to extra perspectives, and would guide him through the puzzles and offer help. There would be monster like bad guys, like evil wizards, out to sabotage you in the virtual world, and it was a really immersive game. Anyway, recalling it has got me thinking more about the idea of using the computer just as a tool, like so many texts I have read suggest, and placing ephasise on person to person interaction, so that people have to work together to get full use from some sort of interactive installation game. A bit like Sohelia spoke about last term, except I'm thinking of a more fantastical environment rather than robotic, or even no environment at all, just some sort of mentally challenging puzzle. I've also been thinking about the idea of forcing your opinions on another, and having them mistake the ideas as their own, another point made in a lot of the texts I've read recently (although I've looked at so many they are all beginning to blur in my mind- will be re-reading in full with lots of note making next week!), and was re-enforced by a comment in a Carlos Casteneda text that was recommended to me, about why forcing your ideas onto another is a bad thing. I have come up with a couple of ideas related to these ideas, to do with stories told through montage installations and lighting that guide one user to follow a certain narrative, but then using exactly the same images and lights, re-arrange the materials to be more mysterious and allowing of multiple narratives. It would need to work so that both users have someway of comparing experiences afterwards, but would explore the idea of how physically non-interactive materials can be arranged to really provoke mental interaction, dependant on the way they are presented, and how the user who could get the most mental interaction would benefit more and have a better experience than the user that couldn't. Perhaps this could even be in the form of a website where the user is asked to choose one 'portal' from the splash page, and then at the end reaches a forum where they can interact with others and discuss the experience. I'm thinking on my feet a bit here, as I find this blog most effective for typing out my ideas as they come to me, and then working them out in workbook, partially becuase all the feedback I've gotten so far has inspired me in one way or another.

However, time planning concern, by about Wednesday I think I'm going to stop sourcing out loads of research/inspirations for a bit, and review all my ideas and research so far, to figure out what direction to go in for the final idea, and start to develop/research it in more specific detail, although I'll keep an open mind the whole way towards change, I just think I need to give myself a little time to let what I have been inspired by and researched so far to sink in a little and brew, and it would be good to write more structured report/essay for my work book about what I have learnt about interactivity so far, because it's such a vast amount!