Theme: Play and Place
Method: I used cardboards to create a "helmet", on which you can rack your phone and look at the world by looking at it screen.
Context: As the material in class pointed out, "place" is a mixture of space and features of human activities; not just in terms of how it is modified to suit its purpose, but also opinion wise, by consent, a position for some thing to happened. Thus approaches to resolve such a issue is to either work on the phyisical part of the place, or play with conceptual. Considering the scope of the project, I felt it might be easier to work on the perspective part. I'm always interested in the "detachment" in the absurdity of extentialism and the spetacle of situationism, the phone becomes a perfect body for ideas that the human being's inability of looking at what happening, and of course where they are. Thus I had this idea of "LR(literal reality) Helmet" idea, which indicates the level of discussion happening over here(not touching the problem at all).
Unlike VR head set, this mask hides the users human features and separate the user fromt he world, the only "exit" it has is a camera-sized whole allowing the user's phone to take a look at the things which should be 100%ly capable of being seen by the eyes. A system like this creates a barrier between the user and the world and to an extend replaces the user's eye with their phone to look at places, while the helmet itself becomes the user's presentation in the place. But the user is still able to act the way he wanted and, well, to show that this form of deformation will not affect their life much.
Response: This medieval-knight-ish helmet can rest on the users shoulder, and the phone rack seem to be functional enough to support the weight of a hand phone. Three people in the class room tested the headset out and the general feedback is that the place is stripped of it's depth as it was flattened by the screen. Also I find out that it is hard sometimes to figure out my relative position to the objects around me, since the size of my head is changed by the helmet. Also, since the user will be looking at the screen instead of the world, his body will function accordingly, eyes are trying to focus on the things at the place, but due to it's only an image on the screen, the focus instead blurs the phone screen, when our eyes try to capture the real image in the actual place. This is really interesting, partially ressembles the idea of human being's inablity to understand or see the "true" world.
Besides all the conceptual part, the device itself is fun, cuz it changes my view into an RPG like perspective, while my reflection in the mirror is a humanoid being with a giant helmet on. It's fun, really.