Thesis – first entry

Here are my ideas for my thesis so far:

Photography Class Platform


A mobile device, software and curriculum for teaching photography. 

Each student has this mobile device that will be used to take and submit pictures during class, receive the professor’s assignments, comments, and grades as well as share the pictures and comments amongst each other. 
The professor would have the “master” device that is capable of creating the assignments, sending them out, receive the pictures from the students, reply with voice recorded comments, and grade each student.  This could potentially be done on a PC/Mac for convenience. 
The devices will communicate via a wireless peer to peer network ideally.
Process:
  1. Students get their assignment on the device.
  2. Students go out and take pictures. 
  3. Each picture is automatically sent back to the teacher’s device. 
  4. The pictures are tagged with ambient sound, music being played on iPod, and GPS location.
  5. The teacher replies to the student with his voice recorded comments. 
  6. Student takes more pictures or goes to the next assignment.
  7. At the end of the class the teacher will give out each student’s grade based on their work.
  8.  The students can share the pictures and comments received between them after class.
Possibly develop into a platform with applications that facilitate and enrich the educational process in developing nations or in classrooms with no PCs or multimedia presentation tools.

SPiRT (Subconscious Picture Rating Tool)

Our private picture libraries are ever growing. Using eye tracking, I propose to rate your pictures by simply looking at them. The more your eye stays on one picture, the higher the rating it gets. 

I propose using a head mounted display with eye and head tracking to show the photos in a 3D world. The user would be standing at the center of a slowly rotating globe. The pictures are displayed on the walls of this globe. The user simply looks around at the pictures, which are changing with each rotation. 
The final result is a set of pictures that the user looked at the most. 
iRateMusic
A music rating tool. A random 10 seconds clip of two songs are played to the user in sequence. The user then selects which one they prefer. After a while of “playing” iRate – songs will be rated according to comparing the winners.

KaleidoSound

A kaleidoscope that generates sounds/music according to what the user is seeing. The “analogue” visuals will generate digital sounds.