Last week, I had a very valuable conversation with Daniel about where I stood in my project.
At that point, I had been struggling for a few days trying to figure out how I would connect the devices to the internet in a way that they could find and communicate with one another. Although I was making some progress, it was very slow progress and I didn't realize that this was actually drawing me (haha) away from the artistic part of why I was doing this project to begin with.
Daniel said that as for the devices communicating, an app would probably be the best approach in terms of attracting users. People have a large attachment to their phones, so having an app could make the device seem more personal. On the other hand, I did find out from Particle through Twitter that their Spark Cores can in fact communicate across separate wifis. So I have two options to explore once I get to the complicated back-end work, but at this point I'm going to pivot from that research and focus on developing the creative front-end.
This got us into an exciting conversation about what directions my device could go in to make it unique from existing products. We talked about letting the stroke change in weight depending on the pressure you apply, and having a mode where you can pick emojis or even stickers and gifs that you can customize and use in drawings. I also realized that if we allow a lot of leeway for creativity, we need to see whether the user would spend a lot of time on each drawing and therefore want to save their artwork. This would be another reason to create an app.
Another interesting topic we got on was the idea of making this an open-source project or even a kit once I get to a point where I feel good about it. I could provide all of my code as well as a list of the materials that I used and let people iterate upon what I've done. The results could be influenced by a huge variety of creative minds, if enough people were interested.
At that point, I had been struggling for a few days trying to figure out how I would connect the devices to the internet in a way that they could find and communicate with one another. Although I was making some progress, it was very slow progress and I didn't realize that this was actually drawing me (haha) away from the artistic part of why I was doing this project to begin with.
Daniel said that as for the devices communicating, an app would probably be the best approach in terms of attracting users. People have a large attachment to their phones, so having an app could make the device seem more personal. On the other hand, I did find out from Particle through Twitter that their Spark Cores can in fact communicate across separate wifis. So I have two options to explore once I get to the complicated back-end work, but at this point I'm going to pivot from that research and focus on developing the creative front-end.
This got us into an exciting conversation about what directions my device could go in to make it unique from existing products. We talked about letting the stroke change in weight depending on the pressure you apply, and having a mode where you can pick emojis or even stickers and gifs that you can customize and use in drawings. I also realized that if we allow a lot of leeway for creativity, we need to see whether the user would spend a lot of time on each drawing and therefore want to save their artwork. This would be another reason to create an app.
Another interesting topic we got on was the idea of making this an open-source project or even a kit once I get to a point where I feel good about it. I could provide all of my code as well as a list of the materials that I used and let people iterate upon what I've done. The results could be influenced by a huge variety of creative minds, if enough people were interested.