From now on, following course recommendations, these blogs will be a little shorter and weekly.
We created our first few prototypes this week. First, we covered a pair of glasses with butter and brought in a pair of blackout sunglasses. The former helped us see how well we could activate the human gaze detection system (GDS) without precise vision, and the latter saw if our GDS would be triggered when we could not see the other person’s eyes. In both cases throughout our testing, we found the triggers to be remarkably consistent in firing, showing that there is likely an aspect to the GDS separate to eye contact.
We also taped a mask (of John Fass, the course leader) to a baseball cap to create a constant sense of being watched, even in peripheral vision. We noticed that this made everybody who wore it incredibly uncomfortable, although it was fairly unrealistic. From feedback in our presentation, we were reassured that the idea of studying the effect of GDS on heightened self-awareness (as mentioned in Conty, George, Hietanen 2016) was a positive one, and so we are more inclined to build a more versatile experiment-based prototype for our final design. We plan on doing something to incorporate movement, a key part of the human GDS, and so we plan on including a digital element (via a mobile phone or tablet).
Harry Solomons 