My "You Call It" blog 10-21-10

For this particular blog, I've used a combination of what I've used in the fear experiment and of the technology in the Virtual Reality Cave in the Advanced Visualization Lab to create a Virtual Reality Haunted House tour.

The haunted house would contain the following:

+3D glasses for the tour
+Virtual Reality Cave technology
+4-D technology(wind effects, water effects, etc)
+Random Monster/Ghost Appearances
+Randomly Generated Maps
+Treadmill

The reason I use random generation for this project is to play on people's fears of the unexpected and unknown, just like in Kyle's project and in my Bugaboo chair project.

Here is a "quick and dirty" mockup of what the front of the house would look like:



And this is what the inside of the house would look like:

I used "quick and dirty" sketches for the mock-ups of my creation, because I might go to Kings Island this Saturday and might spend the night at Ohio.

Conclusion to Fear Experiment 9-30-10

EDIT: I added a link to my hypothesis blog below.

The project I had done for Monday's class was called the Bugaboo chair.

On my hypothesis blog, I predicted that people would be squeamish.

61.111% of the class had a reaction somewhat related to squeamishness, which according to http://thesaurus.com/browse/squeamish, is similar to unsettlement, upset, sickliness, and disgust.

33.333% of the class responded with positive acclaim and praises of ingenuity.

Finally, 1 person had the response "Slip and Slide"...though I couldn't tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

According to the results, I believe that the experiment was mostly successful. I believe it was because I had prepared visual aids for the audience and performed an impromptu demonstration using a volunteer. However, if I were to make it better, I could have done the following if I was given much more time:

+Prepared my speech far in advance
+Actually brought more props for physical demonstration purposes.
+Created higher-quality(i.e. color) mockups of the project in question.

I had plenty of other fears to choose from, such as pain, heights, or criticism, but the fear of insects was the only one I could think of that could manifest itself in a physical form.

Not that many people were able to present this week, but out of all the projects that were presented and those that probably scared me the most, it was probably Kyle's psychological experiment in which he told us all to plug our ears and keep our eyes closed. It affected me strongly, because I was scared that Kyle or someone else was gonna touch me randomly. That would have startled me and made me scream. Kyle's was almost the same as my project, except my project didn't involve cutting off hearing with sound blockage of any kind, because sound was an integral part of my project, especially with the buzzing rod speakers. It was the element of surprise and fear of the unknown that could psychologically affect anyone.

Response to today's class 9-27-10

Today we presented our fear-based projects in class, as part of our scientific method midterm blog.
There were so many projects that I couldn't really list them all. So I'll just give out my top five.

5. Kara Yerke-her project was ABC(already been chewed) gum/gum found unwrapped on the ground. I wouldn't eat that gum, because I found it disgusting.
4. Thomas Fraley-he brought a live mouse to class. Her name was Jezebel. She was kinda cute, but it made me fear for my life because she was so small.
3. Julia Lipps-she popped some balloons. The time at which she popped each one was random and unexpected, so it startled me.
2. Kathryn Thacker-we had a lot of fun with this one. She hid someone in a cardboard box, and saw how long he would last until he freaked out. He stayed in there for...ten minutes, I believe.
1. William Wallace-he lit his hand on fire using antibacterial hand sanitizer and a lighter. A LIGHTER. I'm surprised that it didn't get him in trouble with administrators. It did look cool, though.

There were some people who held their projects off until next week, so they told stories instead. Sean told the raunchiest one, while Travis told a painful one.