Concept
Background
Instant messenger has become one of major ways to communicate between friends, BUT:
- No physical presence of the remote person
- Little emotional engagement
- Limited to textual feedback
The Egg
Creature within the egg
During pregnancy, unborn baby is proven to have physical and emotional links with the mother through biochemistry.
By shaping the device as an egg, it creates a sense of a living creature within it, which is being "fed" information through the USB cable, its "umbilical cable"
Dino is an "Ambient display creature" that is true to "calm computing", which concentrates on elimination of visible technology
It has various forms of information output: Kinetic, Chromatic and Acoustic.
I wanted to create a physical agent reflecting on MSN messenger conversations but I did not want to settle with simple forms of display using screens or just LEDs.
Dino is a playful creature inside an egg that responds to emoticons and certain words.
Dino uses a combination of two visualisation means to create a large range of behavioural modes with subtle differences.
It responds to both immediate events as well as changing behaviour by activities over-time.
Dino expresses emotions contained within the words being exchanged through motion, sound and colour
It visualises MSN messenger activity to the user and also to a third person who may not be engaged in the conversation
It is also a physical representation of a remote person