We live in a world that is increasingly digital, working and growing in communities where intellectual self-expression is important, but we’re unable to express ourselves physically. Our capstone project allows users to express themselves with their actions in the physical world to affect the appearance of their avatar interaction with friends online.
This way we remove the lines between our physical and digital selves allowing users to reinforce positive habits over time and gain recognition and support for when we are trying to make a positive change in our lives.
“Hey man, wow it looks like you’ve been running a lot recently, I can see from the clothes on your Avatar. Well done pal. We should go for a run when we finally meet in person bro!”
"Amazing - you’ve gone 60 days with smoking a cigarette, I can see from your Avatar. I really want to quit too, tell me more about the app you’ve been using to help you quit? Your earnt a new dress for your Avatar going that long without smoking - that’s so cool! "
i would recommend either “stealing” a proven avatar creative concept or spending a lot of time user-testing it – my instinct is you may find it easier to go cartoonish (think Snap / bitmoji) than ultra-realistic at least for MVP
Something you also made me thought of, may or may not be relevant, is the role of mental health…! Especially in a work context, it would be great to find ways to remove the stigmas and let people express themselves in a healthy way.
Yeah we’ve spoken about this as a very distant future possibility. We’ve been somewhat inspired by Ready player one and imagine a future where there is a single digital platform that people where people congregate and interact and play digitally
I like this idea a lot. I’ve used an iPhone app called HeartWatch-- and one of the features is this generic avatar guy- who like you mentioned get a little trimmer and more alert as you do more movement/activity over the course of the day and then if you hit your goals or some combination of your metrics, his outfit changes to a superhero and he sort of hovers like he’s flying. I think it would be way more reinforcing for the avatar to be of the individual users as you suggest for your project. It’d be cool to have some options that change the appearance of avatar slightly over the course of the day for hitting certain goals- to provide some immediate reinforcement and then have options for the longer term goals like you mentioned. Being able to “shop” for a new outfit after a week of hitting your steps goal or being able to unlock different facial expressions etc after hitting your mediation goal. There are lots of possibilities and I like @roham 's suggestion of considering including mental health things too. There’s not a ton of research on this-- but there are a few studies looking at the impact of the avatar on health and well-being, so I think there’s a good case to be made for the value of this.
daniel - the dream is to make a physical-digital interface the creates a universal avatar that can be used in real world communication and also in games. I’d like to learn more about nexus and whether our product could fit within this
Ready player one is a really big inspiration for this product
