HW-1

Beyond Being There

The reading was an interesting framework with which to understand class and the topic of real-time communications. I really liked the mental model of the crutch framework (we make tools that restore the broken state of not being there to perfect state of being there).

After reflecting in class, I realized I was really interested in the data part of the real-time communications rather than just focusing on how we can improve audio/visual. I really liked the automatic archival nature of many telecommunications (Google Docs, Figma, etc). One tool I think that gets close to enhancing face-to-face communication is Miro; it allows infinite space to work that is beneficial both when working remotely or physically together.

It's really hard to think of interactions that can replace the face-to-face one. Off the top of my head, one interesting situation in face-to-face communication that would be interesting to address would be the tendency towards checking your phone during awkward silence; how would technology mitigate that?

Real-Time Connection

Prompt:

Design a real-time connected experience for two people using p5LiveMedia and p5.js.

Ask yourselves:

Who is this experience for? Friends? Strangers?
What is shared between the participants?
Where is this interaction taking place?
Why? What is the nature of this interaction?

Link:

https://editor.p5js.org/MsRainwater/sketches/v5Tshz8i2

Initial Idea:

Initially, I was really curious about tackling the space for strangers, but I struggled on thinking about questions or prompts that would make them feel comfortable and were appropriate (unmoderated spaces after a while could be dangerous). Even though not everyone likes games, I ended up settling on Charades because it's pretty ubiquitous, and simple enough to learn if you don't know it.

Current Implementation

Breakdown:

Who: Friends or people vaguely familiar with each other (classmates, colleagues)
What: data (the game) and video
Where: players use their video to record their pantomiming, as part of the core game mechanic. Additionally, each player otherwise sees their "role" in the game on their screen.
Why: icebreaker activity or just for a fun mini-game

Process:

The main bulk of the problem for me was getting stuck in determining which player guesses first and which one pantomimes first - funnily enough I was only able to see the ids associated with the socket via the getData callback but not from the start (when printing the p4lm obj it gave a different ID than that of the callback). I ended up hacking the start button callback to immediately assign whoever hit the start button first to player 1 (the player who would pantomime first).

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