Week3: Nostalgia

I had decided to make a video on nostalgia, which in a way captures another aspect of Bhavesh's video: Escapism i.e. recapturing another period in time. I decided to film nostalgia because it is universally and massively relatable: arguably almost every adult has experienced nostalgia. I separated adulthood and childhood in my initial brainstorm (see below), and tried to identify what they generally feel nostalgic about. I managed to separate the feelings of nostalgia into events and people.

Graphical representation:

Nostalgia is like a line between a person and an object that sparks nostalgia, connecting them emotionally to someone or something in their past. We are constantly creating these connections (much like how connections are created in the brain for memory), and we develop a 'web' of feelings. Every individual has their own constantly growing 'web', but occasionally certain points overlap where there is joint experience. However, we have no way of knowing the significance of various objects that are important to other people.



Below is a diagram of how objects are 'connected' to feelings. Would it be possible to view alternative nostalgia's i.e. other peoples nostalgia's for the same objects? eBay's xcommerce is creating an app that allows a user to take a photo of an object which is searched for in a database. It could be possible to take a photo of an object, and then see information that other people have attached to it. Almost like the 'internet of things'.

The diagram below shows a everyone's nostalgic 'web', and demonstrates how certain peoples 'webs' can overlap. You could you an augmented reality 'patch' to show someone else's reality.

When making my film about nostalgia, i wanted to show the emotional connections between people and objects/spaces, the fact that we cannot see other peoples connections, and my ideas about how to 'enrich' objects and spaces to allow us to see nostalgia through an interface.

I created a rough storyboard, and decided to film the area where i grew up as there are lots of nostalgic places. I took a few shots in a shopping centre to demonstrate how the augmented reality could work to enrich the space. I also showed how augmented reality apps currently work, with my suggestions to improve them by allowing individuals to share photos/videos/sound and to link it to a specific locations. Also for the secondary user to filter this information based on either a user demographic or a specific user: to follow their chain of experience.

This listed which senses could be displayed, and some more concept work on how the augmented reality app would work.

The developer kit for junaio is available online http://dev.junaio.com/

I also found a great list of augmented reality apps which have some great ideas: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/4288-10-mindblowing-augmented-reality-apps-and-videos one of my favourites is http://jamesalliban.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/ar-business-card/ which is an enriched business card. You can use it yourself.

SREngine is really interesting and uses actual image recognition rather than location recognition.

It would be interesting to actually develop this idea further.

My final outcome video is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1S77SweM4M