Overview：
Irene’s idea was to create a more playful and immersive services to expose people to different ways of thinking and living.
In my thought, each experience needs our senses to get involved, so my concept mainly focuses on how to involve as many senses as possible to make the experience more appealing.
I break this question down to several parts, which represents different sense. By integrating these different parts, we then can get the system which, in my opinion, may go together with Irene’s idea.
Brief：
Create a virtual reality system that can help people experience things that are new to them, thus help them explore the world in a different perspective. Since we now live in a world where information surround us are just repeat of our own willing. We nee to do more to create visceral and informative experiences to connect people to scenes that marvel and force them to look upon a subject with new eyes on account of having learned something new.
Approach：
When reading this statement from Irene, three different kinds of things bumped into my mind.
First one is book. Back to early years when I didn’t have access to Internet, the best way for me to know more about the outside world was reading books. The stories as well as pictures in books can really take me to another world
Second are documents, varying from ones of animals in the amazon forest, to those recording the culture or history of other countries. Though each frame of the documents, we can temporally experience another environment or life.
The last are those interactive systems in the museum. Simply staring at the exhibitions pictures or introduction words may not touch us enough. Interactive systems can make people more involved in the experience and think more about the topic.
These methods are no novelty any more. The only senses they involved in the process are eyes and ears (mainly eyes are used, the last one also involves hands, but for a limited use), and the content are mostly based on two-dimensional. This intrigues me to design a prototype of system which can involves more senses and create experience in the three-dimensional context.
Process：
It may have to rely on some existing tools developed for the same purpose. Some good examples are VR headsets like Oculus Rift, Sony PlayStation VR, Samsung Gear VR and Avegant Glyph, VR input devices like Leap Motion and Virtuix Omni, and some three-dimensional audios, as well as videos, which can go along with these devices.
The prototype system in my mind should be set in enclosed surroundings. It should at least includes a VR headset, which can involve eyes, which probably tis he most important sense in our whole experience, and a surrounding sound box which can play three-dimensional audios that help improve the experience.
To track the motion of the person, there may be some senses attached to him/her. This can help locate the person and refresh the zoom or location.
Also to maximum the experience, we may have portable touch screens which can get closer to user’s fingers whenever it is possible for them to “touch” something. We may also have some smell sensors, which can produce relating smells when necessary.
Also, to further the experience, we may add some devices, which can let user stand on and mimic the motions of tilting and shaking, and give user the feeling of losing gravity.
Outcome：
Since I don’t have relating equipment at hand to build the prototype, I will just include several relating videos to give an image of what this system may look like.
HTC Vive which gives a good example of whole to involve our eyes. This could be the basic of the whole system. All in all, “to see is to believe”.
3D audio is an example of 3D audios. With this kind of audios, we may be able to bring the hearing sense to play.
Motion Tracking shows what we can get by tracking human motions. By tracking the motion of users though the sensors attached to them may help adjust the view and zoom instantly
Iron Man 2 gives an image of how touch screen system may help with the whole system, maybe people can touch the screen to trigger some new events or scences
Oculus Roller Coaster simulates the scene of riding roller coaster, which gave me this idea of involving the feeling of moving and losing gravity to a novel VR system.
Motion Simulator a prototype of how to implement a motion simulator, which may be used to achieve the effect of gravity-losing.
Next Step Proposal：
Since each part of this system already has their own prototype devices coming out, to integrate these devices and make a huge virtual reality system wouldn’t be that difficult and can be implemented in seeable future.
Also, I’m kind of interested to see how taste, the only one left behind in the “five senses”, can be collaborated in VR systems in the future.