Your Perception is Your Reality
Perception is everything. We perceive everything, every day. Our perception can be skewed, however. Perception is based off of many different criteria. Typically, our senses play the biggest role in our perception. What we see, smell, touch, and, most importantly, hear, change our perception. If someone were to tell you that the image you are looking at is plans for a new campus of buildings, you see building plans. However, if someone were to tell you that the image is a concept for a billboard with the word “life,” you may see something completely different.
Perceptional Research
The example above is from Chapter 1 of Jeff Johnson’s Designing with the Mind in Mind. The chapter is titled, “We Perceive What We Expect.” The concept is about how our perceptions are biased by experience. We are told what something is and that in turn makes us see something through a specific lense. I chose to look into other possible ways to display the concept that was introduced in this chapter. For this I started with some “How Might We” notes:
- How might we illustrate or visualize the idea of perception bias?
- How might we hide something in a visual that can go unseen unless looked at with a specific perception filter?
- How might we communicate the idea of perception based on experience to someone who has no experience in that regard?
- How might we use perception to attract attention?
- How might we influence a person’s perception to see what we want them to see?
This helped me to figure out how I can accomplish what I set out do. It gets what I need to accomplish out in its simplest form. The next step after that is the ideation phase.
Ideation: Making the Intangible, Tangible…Sort Of
Now, the next problem to solve was a little tricky. How do you make a concept that is so intangible, tangible? How do you make something so abstract, not abstract? For this, I turned to a process/game called “Crazy 8's.” The basic gist of Crazy 8’s is to sketch 8 ideas, but you only get one minute per idea. It’s a way of getting raw ideas out of your head and in front of you.
I came up with a few ideas, three to be exact. The first is a poster with an optical illusion similar to the vase/face illusion (illusion where it looks like a vase or two faces), building a perspective-based graphic thing in a sandbox game, and the same perspective-based graphic thing in some 3D software. The next step was to refine these sketches.
After they were refined, and critiqued by some peers, I chose to go with the first option: A perspective based video.
Prototype and Test: How Does This Even Work!?
Now I was ready to prototype! I chose to do this in 3D software for multiple reasons. The main reason being, I could set up two camera views: the first a static view that always showed the ending frame of where the video would end up and the second a moveable, rotatable, view that I could use to place the blocks. While it looks complicated to make, it is actually quite simple. It’s just tedious and hard to edit if you need to shift everything over.
As for the testing phase, I showed three people and asked them some questions about what they saw. For the most part, all three people understood the purpose of the video and were surprised by the ending. They also thoroughly enjoyed it! From these tests, it seemed like the video was basically “perfect!” If I were to change something though, I would make it actually interactive. Overall, I was really happy with how this turned out and it was fun to make. I loved seeing people’s reactions to the end and trying to see them figure out how it was done.
