Interaction types

Our project can be divided to three parts according to the interactions so far:

Visualisation of happy points

To see your own and other's happiness level.

Some additional options:

• RGB LED could give the color of a specific shape (eg. heart), and change its tint according to participant's happiness level. It could also blink when it's too low.

• Nice looking emojis on a screen or on a led matrix.

• Pictures of different facial expressions of each participant could be shown on a little screen to represent their happiness level. - In this way people will still wear their everyday poker face, but 'real' feelings could be also shown in a more personal way.

Recognising other participants in the 'game'

It's not reasonable to expect the participants to always look for other players in their everyday life's crowded environment. Therefore, some kind of notification is needed when an other player is around. However, the notification should not be annoying when there are a lot of players around!

From a technological point of view, to be able to implement this, the used platforms should somehow sense each other's proximity as well.

Interaction between participants

Maybe the most interesting part of the project is that the participants will have to physically interact with each other to get happy points. Some ideas are already listed in our previous post about the potential ways of interactions. One interesting aspect of this project could be to experiment with the different ways of interaction. It would be really nice to see what are those interactions what people like or dare to initiate and what are those which are the best to get. 

Although, this would make the project a little bit more difficult. Logging of the interactions would be needed and also a way to let the receiver participants rate the interaction they experience.

It would be also nice to include sound messages in the list of interactions, although the group has rejected the idea because of the technological difficulties it would entail.

One direction where we could start now is to experiment with the makey makey modul which makes skin to skin interactions possible. I think with some conductive thread and fabric we could also sense touches on the clothes.