#video prototyping

[clarasjournal]

Initial video prototyping

I’ve begun filming myself watching Netflix while using gestures to control pause/play, volume and skip. It’s going so and so, I don’t have any prior skills in video making and even less in video editing. With that said it’s clear that video prototyping is completely new to me, but also very interesting.

I decided to stick with my initial idea of making the gestures as simplistic as possible, making it possible to perform them even lying down - as I'm doing in the GIF example above. I find this as intuitive as possible as well, turning UP the volume by gesturing an “up”-motion with your hand, and turning DOWN the volume by gesturing a “down”-motion with your hand. To pause I’ve decided to keep the motion as similar to the commonly known gesture for “stop”, and I decided to have the same motion for play, since it is a function that is either on or off. Example below:

So when it’s playing it will pause when this “stop” motion is gestured. When it’s paused it will play when this “stop” motion is gestured. I chose it because it have certain similarities to when you’re watching something on an interactive screen - where you tap the screen both when you want to pause and when you want to play. It is also similar to using a remote control where you push the same button when you want to pause or play. To skip I decided to gesture to the right with my hand. This is also similar to how you do it on an interactive screen and a remote control - signing you want to move forward. Example below:

From here I will try to make a coherent video displaying my thoughts on how gesture control could work for Netflix-watchers without using my voice or text. My vision is for it to be simple enough for everyone to understand as effortlessly as possible.

[rkcwritesherprocess-blog]

For our final poster presentation and pitch, I wrote and edited this quick video sketch to demonstrate how easy it would be to install and use Anzen. While we originally wanted to film everything, our team decided to go with pictures because it would have been difficult to film a car crash occurring. 

Special thanks to the people at Pep Boys who let us film/take pictures with them and to the cycler who didn’t call the police on us when he thought our staged car crash was real when he rode by. :]

[rkcwritesherprocess-blog]

In this quick video prototype, I explain how a tutor on Know It can create a class they want to teach quickly. The high-fidelity, hi-def clickthrough on InVision can be found here. 

[prototyping-research]

Technique: Video Prototypes

Wendy E. Mackay, Anne V. Ratzer, Paul Janecek. 2000.  "Artifacts for Design: Bridging between abstraction and detail." In Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems. ACM.

Video artifacts help bridge the gap between abstraction and detail in the design process. This paper describes how our use and re-use of video artifacts affected the redesign of a graphical editor for building, simulating, and analyzing Coloured Petri Nets. The two primary goals of the project were to create design abstractions that integrate recent advances in graphical interaction techniques and to explicitly support specific patterns of use of Petri nets in real-world settings.

Using a participatory design process, we organized a series of video-based design activities that helped us manage the tension between finding useful design abstractions and specifying the details of the user interface. Video artifacts resulting from one activity became the basis for the next, facilitating communication among members of the multidisciplinary design team. The video artifacts provided an efficient way of capturing and incorporating subtle aspects of “Petri Nets In Use” into our design and ensured that the implementation of our design principles was grounded in real-world work practices.

[shanshangao]

What I love in my prototyping class

[shanshanthesisnotes-blog]

Video Editing Weekend

This weekend I am editing a video for my one of Entrepreneurial Assignment, plain English.

As this semester, part of prototyping class was discussing how to use video to telling the story of design, I realize it is a powerful tool for we presenting the idea. Here were several design agency had done pretty good job of video user journey.

http://sandwichvideo.com/

http://www.rga.com/

At the beginning of this semester, I saw a bunch of photos introducing how to binding a books by a  Chinese amateur artist which inspired me a lot. I started to study book binding and addicted to it. So I decided to using video to explain "how to binding a book", which telling book binding in a clear but interesting way. I studied a little bit of the online book binding videos, among which most are either too serious or too complicated. 

So before I shooting the video, I was thinking about how to make book binding more feasible. I choose the most achieve materials, like the paper, instead of using professional paper, I choose the normal printing paper, and they work pretty well. Also, I choose the most simplified way of sewing.  And I love the result I made.

After I documented all the process. I wrote a script of my first video script, thanks my new friend Yongru, who's a computer art student at SVA, she gave me several suggestion of the scripts. I re-edited again make the story more concise and clear. 

One more exciting thing was that I finally kicked off Final cut pro.  Although most of time, imovie is good enough to cover some basic need, like chopping, adding text, final cut pro is much better which allows me realizing a various of windows play in a screen, editing key scene  and fancy text results. Thanks the great help from Yongru, again, I figured it out  pretty quickly.  The picture was shoot in the computer art department studio. 

[chriswoebken]

Thoughtexperiments on Futures Prototyping

Don't you remember Sun's Starfire and Apple's Knowledge Navigator video? The corporate imaginations of the future created in the 80ies are set 10 to 20 years in the future, but they outdated immediately. As a thought experiment I dubbed a collection of Silicon Valley's corporate futures dubbed on a "Back to the Future" rental VHS tape.

I shared this BTTF tape with Julian Bleecker and we started and exciting discussion about these corporate future video's. Why are they so ikky? Is it the idealised smart home, the device centric scenarios, the language or the uncanny happy family setting? Maybe there is good examples in movies to find. Sometimes the technology disappears in the background. The first example that came to my mind was a scene from "Fahrenheit 451" that Noam Toran showed in a presentation at the Royal College years ago. In the movie you can see a smart home(ish) scene from the future with flat panel displays, automatic doors. What's different than the corporate visions is that it seems the technology is ambient in the background. Is it because you can notice something is wrong in the relationship of that couple in the film?