UIST: the crazy fun of Brainstroming

So... I've somehow thrown myself into a User Interface Software and Technology Student Competition that's based off of Microsoft's TouchMouse!

"Get your thinking caps on and ideas flowing for the third annual UIST Student Innovation Contest (SIC). The goal of the contest is to innovate new interactions on state-of-the-art hardware. We give you the latter, and you show us what you can do.

This year we're going to be working with the brand, spanking new Microsoft TouchMouse. In addition to supplying you the hardware for free, Microsoft is providing exclusive access to a pre-release of the TouchMouse API. This lets you get at the underlying 2D capacitive image captured the mouse’s sensor matrix; You’ll get a chance to hack together some cool demos before the everyone else gets their hands on the API. You even get to keep the mouse after you're done!"

About six of us started brainstorming ideas for the Mouse implementation and, oh how crazy our ideas were! It was great! We were all random, freely spouting our thoughts ranging from only semi-serious contraptions, curious musings stemming from a small inkling, detailed articulated ideas (albeit those were few) to fun quirks that we just liked for fun. Brainstorming chaos aside, we were all respectfully attentive to each others ideas, recording each down, boucing and feeding off them, giving them their equal due on the idea table before they got bumped over by or morphed into another even better idea.

I'm wondering how much of our ideas I should reveal since this is a competition! :P

But some things we thought about:

• We made note to avoid using the mouse like a controller. This is a very common use a of a technical equipment and the only selling point of that would be how inventive we could be with the gesture coordination.
• We recognized our tendencies to draw from already established and typical set ups like controller plus screen and the treacherous screen-mouse-keyboard ones.
• And so we worked to move away from the little screen be expanding the size
• moving the screen or mouse movement away from their typical orientation weather it be horizontal of vertical
• and considering the output, for example, eliminating most visuals and focusing on tactile output.
• We found a very innovative aspect of the TouchMouse depended on it's ability to sense gestures through material, so we wanted to optimize that quality.

Some things I learned:

• I tend to tone down my imagination for fear of an inability to achieve. For example, I would say, "that's a great idea but I doubt we will be able to finish that or it would be hard. Let's stay with something simpler." I've become a very cautious person, someone unwilling to be vulnerable and take chances on the fact that I might fail. I want to change and to remember even if I can't reach the moon I'd end up amoung the stars anyway. So, be creative, don't let fear and reality stop you. You can always prune back later.
• Robots are fun and exciting but can be hard and time consuming.
• I think we tend to them because of how they can be similarly automated to be akin to us.
• Make any object an animal or fuzzy and the idea is infinitely better.
• Turtles purr.

That's it for today! Keep posted for more hints about our project event!