For my thesis project, I’ve decided to create an interactive video relaxation program targeting people with mental, physical, visual, auditory, and sensory disabilities. However, everyone will be able to use it as well. The name of this project so far is called Engage-Me-Now, as seen in the title, to promote engagement for everyone. Using sensory-friendly visuals and audio, it would be an entertaining form of interactive media that engages and relaxes its users. Now, there are apps specifically for this, using meditation and tracking behaviors, but I wanted to do something else that everyone can do and enjoy doing, looking forward to relaxing and playing it. That is what would be a huge strength of this project, since it’s something that hasn’t really been done before.
I came up with the idea based on my childhood, as a person with learning disabilities that stem ADHD and Auditory Processing Delay, and my time in occupational therapy. I played a game called Interactive Metronome that consists of clapping your hands together every time you hear a “ding”, like a metronome, for a certain amount of reps. However, the program has evolved much more since I last used it, so I would often get bored with it due to the lack of actual entertaining engagement, which I know they have more of now. In a way, this program helped me relax over time and significantly increased my focus, memory, and cognition. Although I’m not exactly striving for a program just like this, I do need to give credit where credit is due, and I would’ve never thought of this thesis idea in the first place without my experiences with Interactive Metronome.
For my thesis, I would likely use Adobe After Effects for the visuals, Adobe Premiere to tie the program together, possibly some programming, and Adobe Audition for the audio. I would also be researching different examples of sensory-friendly interactive media, such as museum exhibitions, projects, videos, and games, which I have already started. I think a weakness in my project would be that I don’t really know much about programming, so that could impact the amount of which I want to accomplish. Also, everyone has different needs and sensory triggers, so it might be very hard to actually get something to work in the way that it won’t upset anyone.
I don’t have rough sketches just yet, and I’ve summarized the notes of my early findings throughout this post (very sporadically). However, I am updating my thesis slide deck as I do more research. I will be contacting my old speech pathologist, who worked with me since I was a toddler, and also get into contact with other people with disabilities on campus to learn more and create better prototypes. I also don’t really have any other ideas, at this point it would just be minimizing the amount of work I actually can do in this project.