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Steve Yohanan, and Karon E. MacLean / The Haptic Creature Project: Social Human-Robot Interaction through Affective Touch

 The Haptic Creature is made to figure out the power of human-robot interaction, which would be one of the major interactions in human life. It mimics small animals like rabbit, cat or small dogs those can lay on the lap of the people. This can be a good model of human-animal interaction or inter-human interaction because while it could give a feedback to the touch of the users, Haptic Creature is free from the discomfort of relationship or interaction which comes from the difference of gender, culture, social status and familiarity.

 Haptic Creature is also different from conventional animal robot like Paro, Aibo and Huggable because Haptic Creature focuses on the sense of touch, not the visual or auditory sense of the previous ones. The display of emotion and organic interaction was conducted in haptic ways. In the sense of form of the animal, the authors decided to develop in 3 stage - Back of Trick: which can do some adventure about their concept and interaction / Automated prototype: which can conduct some mechanical programming confirmation /  Final Creature: which they didn’t conduct yet.

 The meaning of Haptic Creature is that we can observe which kind of emotional change or interaction can be happened in human-animal interaction. Since this is the robotic version of animal, this could also be applied to the form of human-robot interaction. Also, there was some certainty of appliance to our project. If this haptic touch interaction could affect the emotion of users, we can apply this method to our VR headgear with can give a thermal and auditory feedback for a quality rest or environment simulation.

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Munmun De Choudhury, Michael Gamon, Aaron Hoff, and Asta Roseway / “Moon Phrases”: A Social Media Faciliated Toll for Emotional Reflection and Wellness

 In this broadly-related society, people easily get frustrated and worn emotion state. In this article, the authors are trying to track emotional wellness of people by analyzing web-based SNS data.  “Moon Phrases” is the web application which can track and visualize the participants’ daily mood and emotion by the mentions or twits on the SNS including Twitter, Facebook and e-mail.

 This article is focusing on Twitter, which is a “broadcasting system” of the users’ life. If the user don’t turn on the protection option, everybody can see their life and emotions. I thought because Twitter has a restriction which a twit or mention cannot be more than 140 characters, the accuracy could be lowered or the result could be distorted because of that. But the accuracy was quite high. Through this article, I learned that the emotional expression of the people is like a gas, which can be compressed according to the state of the container.

 The authors focused on the fact that the SNS users are uploading not only t heir mood and emotion but the reason or atmosphere that they’re in which could affect their emotional state. In earlier papers, people were trying to give some earlier warning or analysis about the users’ mood by applying some sensor in everyday device like watch or smartphones. But this project doesn’t need to give those kinds of implanting experience to the users and it was quite accurate and successful. If it could be join together with more comfortable sensing system, the data would be more accurate and rich.

  The importance of mental health is also getting bigger and bigger. I’m also a heavy twitter user and I see many people suffering from solitude and sadness which comes from the life of online. If they can see the analysis and trace about their emotional health on web and what they did when they were emotionally suffering, it could work as a remedy for the individual mental health, but also be a solution to avoid social friction in the internet society.

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I played “마비노기” when I was an elementary school student but I stopped to play because my computer was too foul to play this 1st generation full-3D game. Since I didn’t play the successful social-based MMORPG game after that, I’m a little nervous if I could get along with the other users in the game.

There’re a lot of options in this character making menu.

Her name is Nao. I could remember her demanding me to pay after two hours of play when the users should have subscribe for further game play. I asked her what to do and she said that it’s up to me.

I almost forgot to describe my character. I chose female character because I always picked female character in MMORPG because the clothes of female character are much more beautiful than those of for male characters. Also, since this is an virtual world, I could be different person instead of me in real world.

After some tutorials, my character sent to the square of the village. Because it was late evening of weekend, there were a lot of players talking with other people. Some of them were playing music so I asked some question about how to play a music in this game.

She kindly answered me that the music can be conducted by making a score with music coding system of this game. Many of the people were transcribing the score of existing game BGM or classic musics. 

After that, my character chose to be a warrior because the close battle with dummies was more exciting than other jobs. Even though this ethics group, Elf is not suitable for being warrior, she chose what she wanted to do.

When I returned to the square, a boy character was playing my favorite game BGM from Tales Weaver. I walked closer to him and listened the music for a while. After that, I tried to talk with him.

I said that the music is my favorite and he gave me some thanks to me. After that, he gave me an expensive equipment as a gratitude for a newbie of this game. I was so surprised because I couldn’t get this kind of kindness in other games especially when I don’t know anyone in them.

After the game play, I talked with my friends about the kindness of the users in this game. One of my friends said that the people in ‘마비노기’ is very kind to the newbies because there’re few newbies in this old game. But I played other old games and didn’t feel the kindness like this. I think the kindness of people is from the characteristics of this game, which is social-based.

I didn’t feel uncomfortable with this online-based interaction because I played game since I was a elementary school student. Also, I started to act as a member of online community like bicycle riding club or character drawing club. But the characteristic of the interaction in the game was a little bit different from the chatting because most chatting doesn’t provide avatar or emotion expression system. By the action (Shortcut “N”) of this game, the interaction between the users could be richer than the text style one.

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My 5 Portpolio

1. To The Moon, 2015

I made this with a stamp with my logotype. I wanted to express the space race in 1960s and 1970s which is my favorite material

2. Futura : Shapes From Geometry, 2015

I made this poster to convey my feeling about the typeface ‘Futura’. It has its own aesthetics from simple shapes like triangle and circle. I wanted to express that feeling with simple triangles and squares.

3. Diversity of Univers

I wanted to express the diversity of this typeface because this typeface has a lot of variation. But this typeface has harmony between the variation because they were made by one designer.

4. Bright Moon

I took this photo at the old reclaimed land of Songdo. This field of reeds cannot be seen anymore because it was demolished by the bulldozers and dumper trucks. I activated the flash accidentally but it made the sky looks extraterrestrial.

My Favorite 5. Bright Star

I really like this because this is my first well-done animation. Even though it doesn’t have any sound, I can feel the rhythm of the video. I searched many tutorials to finish this and I paid a lot of time to define the whole key frames and layers.

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Introduction to Verdant_Orca

My name is Dongseong Kim.

I’m a student who’s studying design which makes people live their life easier and happier.

I was born in Ahyeon-Dong, Seoul, S.Korea. The town was very impoverished and sketchy when I was born. My parents always say that they didn’t had enough money to have a washing machine and get enough milk to feed me. They said that I have grown with barley tea. I was slow at learning something. I started to walk and talk later than other kids.

Until getting into a high school, I studied hard as other Korean students. Even thought I learned so slowly in my early days, I think I was quite bright until I was a middle school student. I loved learning and reading books. Until I get into high school, my dream was to be a scientist who makes people live longer.

But the winter break of 2008 changed my path of life. I was stuck by animal characters from webtoon ‘TLT’ of a cartoonist named Kim Jungi and ‘The Great Catsby’ by Kang Do-ha. I bought a pen tablet with my lunar new year’s gift money and started to draw something. My interest about comics community and animation started to grow in this term of my life. But my parents were so skeptical about getting into the animation or art school for my university. So I couldn’t help but postpone my dream to the graduate school.

I studied like other students to get into a good school and didn’t think about majoring animation, art or design. But a strange chance came when I started to apply for the university. One of my friends who know that I’m very interested in animation and design introduced me there is a new design program in Yonsei. I applied right away even though it requires fluent English that I couldn’t achieve as a normal Korean high school student.

Now I’m here in IID and still having some problem about the English. But I’m  enjoying what I’m doing and learning. I’m getting easy about the major that I couldn’t have any professional experience through my life. I’m working as a TA in Design Factory Korea who helps the students with my prototyping skill and thinking about double majoring urban engineering to extend my future as a designer.

Through this ‘Interaction Design’ course, I’d like to learn how to convey my intention or information to other people in an effective way. If I know more about the way to convey our thoughts and intention, there would not be any unnecessary misunderstandings or quarrels.