Recently I’ve had a bit of time on my hands so I’ve been able to pick up on my RSS readers project that was otherwise losing momentum rapidly.
Luckily I came across this great article in New Scientist. Although there’s a lot to take away from the article I suppose the main thing I’m interested in for now is the importance of exhilaration through experiencing fear in both our emotional and psychological development. It’s interesting that we seek it in films and games, maybe because for some of us at least, exhilaration through fear is no longer a part of everyday life. That’s probably a good thing, but I’m wondering what would it mean to recreate these experiences of fear in more subtle ways. Ways that don’t require premeditation on our part, that happen during the course of everyday life.

So, this is a new project, I suppose, called: ‘Living Dangerously’.

After finding an RSS feed that gives real-time (ish) global earthquake data, my initial idea was to use the feed that displays information about minor tremors (recreating major earthquakes is not really appropriate) and earthquakes in order to recreate them in places where they don’t occur naturally.

It seems kind of silly, but I’m wandering if this kind of experience would add a little excitement to the everyday lives of people who feel they need it, and would not normally experience such things? Or is it too grounded in reality? Does the fiction of films and games provide a necessary amount of separation from fear?

Anyway, heres a video of an early experiment…

It’s just a quick test so there’s a lot to do still. Some of the parameters in the code need adjusting so that the changes in motor speed are more pronounced, and it would be good to add i some more behaviours based on the data. For example, the RSS feed also tells you the depth of the tremor.
At the moment the idea is that these motors will have off-centre weights attached to them and be built into objects that will shake, vibrate, move around and maybe fall over, thus recreating the effects of a small tremor. It’d be good to come up with some more inventive methods but that kind of thing develops throughout the process so … we’ll see.