Day 7: Augmented Reality and Victoria Day
At 7:30 AM this monday morning, I sprang out of bed, hurriedly getting ready to head down to breakfast. I made it to breakfast at my usual time, but found it practically empty, with only our Dialogue group and a few other people. Normally it was bustling with other students by this time, but after a few minutes I realized why no other groups were up. It was Victoria Day, a national holiday. Our group headed over to class, and found a similarly empty building, with our professor, David Tames, talking to security. We soon realized that the building had not processed the request to have our passes work during their holiday, and waiting half an hour for security to straighten this out before heading up to our classroom, led by a security guard.
There we met Cindy Bishop, who started us off on our topic this week, Augmented Reality. She explained the idea of augmented reality to us, and how it could overlay real life with additional information. We brought up our past experiences with Augmented Reality, such as the app Pokemon Go, and discussed where it could lead in the future. This was a great introduction and got me very excited to learn about Augmented Reality this week.
Next, Peter Zak spoke to us about how to design products. He spoke about how we could develop solutions for our own problems, look at data, or observe the community around us to come up with product ideas. One’s prior knowledge, notions, and even their current emotions will affect how they react to your product, so one must immerse, reflect and come up with solutions looking into as many of these variables as possible. He left us with the 5 E’s to consider when designing products; effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn. I actually found his lecture quite helpful, because I love coming up with ideas, and I believe considering these variables and strategies would help me get better designs.
Later, we learned about the four sections in the community we were going to reach out to this week. One option was Convenience Stories, which entailed looking into family run stores and how they were disappearing because of the value of the land, despite their integral part in their neighboring community. Building a Better Bloor Dufferin was about how a large plot of land including a high school and a park is being sold to build condos and high rise towers, and trying to reverse that process so that buildings actually needed in the community will be built instead. The group who covers the Newcomer Kitchen will show that the kitchen has Syrian refugee women cook meals, spreading their way of cooking and also earning them some money. Finally, the Bentway Skateboard Group is focusing on combining art and skate parks to build better skate parks and improve the community.
To wrap up our day, we watched a documentary on the Mursi people. It covered how they put on a decorative facade to earn as much money from tourists, dressing up and faking their culture because that’s what tourists wanted. I thought this was very important to consider because the tourists view on this group of people was skewed, and possibly even outright wrong, and when one interviews someone they need to make sure to get an honest story.
And after a long day of class this Monday, I headed home to celebrate Victoria’s Day for an evening, to take a break before our Augmented Reality projects began.
Recent Comments