Research Week 2

The project is starting slowly. All we know is the area topic of immersion and don't have a clear understanding on a question to both ask and answer come the end of the second semester.

The last 2 weeks have been focusing on research on immersion. The research that I first latched onto was on a mental state called "Flow". Proposed by Hungarian psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, "Flow" is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.



Another area of interest that I looked at during this week of research was on the topic of "Change Blindness". This occurs when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene. For change blindness to occur, the change in the scene typically has to coincide with some visual disruption such as eye movement or a brief obscuration of the observed scene or image.

The Colour Card Trick Example

This idea of "Change Blindness" seemed to get the group thinking of good ideas that could lead into our question for the overall project. One test which I thought was interesting was the idea of allowing the player to select their character in a First Person game and change the hand texture during the game and see if they notice the difference. This could lead to other changes such as changing the voice, etc.