Design

Dialog: Games + Information Visualization

I promise to update on my group’s progress. We are getting somewhere and it’s exciting! Lots of data visualizations and interesting spatial/temporal interactions. Our advisor thinks we are heading in a good direction and we also received good feedback from our Microsoft advisor as well. I’ll just mention that we are now working on initial prototypes and GUI concepts. Hopefully we will get some good feedback from participants to make sure we don’t have any unnecessary elements that become distracting.

Again, I’ll post some stuff on our earlier work to keep the flow going.

In the meantime, here is a snippet of dialog I just had with my partner as I’m thinking about how to visualize aggregated user data (caveat - we want to make our system fun and engaging, almost like a game)…

1:46:37 AM kdubz313: we should do a hang man thing
1:46:42 AM kdubz313: every time someone buys a red item, it starts to draw the hang man sketch
1:46:51 AM pandahachiroku0: lol
1:46:54 AM kdubz313: that’d be hilarious
1:47:04 AM kdubz313: and we can tell them how many times they died
1:47:07 AM kdubz313: so cruel..
1:47:13 AM pandahachiroku0: LOL
1:47:15 AM pandahachiroku0: that is so cool
1:47:16 AM pandahachiroku0: haha
1:47:19 AM kdubz313: haha
1:47:19 AM pandahachiroku0: u know
1:47:24 AM pandahachiroku0: when he said make something fun
1:47:26 AM pandahachiroku0: I was like
1:47:30 AM pandahachiroku0: shit…we should make it a game
1:47:36 AM pandahachiroku0: seriously
1:47:40 AM kdubz313: well remember
1:47:41 AM pandahachiroku0: we should come up with a kick ass game
1:47:43 AM kdubz313: we want to keep a positive light
1:47:49 AM pandahachiroku0: ya
1:47:55 AM kdubz313: that’s the tricky part
1:47:58 AM pandahachiroku0: so if it’s a guy
1:47:58 AM kdubz313: it’s easy to make people feel bad
1:48:04 AM pandahachiroku0: they get a virtual chick
1:48:07 AM pandahachiroku0: and if it’s a girl
1:48:13 AM pandahachiroku0: they get a virtual guy
1:48:23 AM pandahachiroku0: to strip for them
1:48:25 AM kdubz313: ..
1:48:28 AM kdubz313: haha
1:48:33 AM pandahachiroku0: c? japanese mind in thinking no offense
1:48:45 AM kdubz313: hahaha no kidding honestly, we were laughing at each other…
1:49:36 AM kdubz313: or we can make a health bingo
1:49:43 AM kdubz313: oh!
1:49:47 AM kdubz313: a social network game
1:49:52 AM kdubz313: where you play connect four!
1:49:56 AM kdubz313: or tic tac toe
1:49:59 AM kdubz313: hahaha
1:50:13 AM pandahachiroku0: nice