A perception to create collaboration

Over the last few weeks our work has been getting very technical and practical but we have always tried to stick to the conceptual part as to why we are choosing certain options. A lot of our decisions we have been making for this project were about how we wanted to immerse the user into our installation and how they will be experiencing this virtual imitation of a worker ant. For our installation to work and create the unified network that we wanted we then needed to understand what it is that would be happening. It would not be a human having this experience of an ant's life but rather a human's perception of what it would be like so they could act like the ant instead and feel as if they are part of this colony.

The structure of the ant.
http://blog.wildaboutants.com/2010/06/27/questions-about-ant-pheromones/

As the ants use their scent trails to trace back to their food we thought this would be difficult for the human users as they will not have antennas and their noses are not the best for detecting smells. For the users to move around in our virtual world comfortably they would have to be able to use their most important sense. Their vision. Otherwise they would not only be less mobile than an ant but they would also not know what they are doing and guessing where they are going. Having audio only as the trail would mean the users would move slowly and cautiously. We thought giving the users their vision in the virtual simulation would allow them to see a trails direction like an ant would smell it. We will limit the distance that the user can see so they are on par with the ants smell distance.

This is just one of the ways we will allow the user to feel as though they are like a worker ant. We are also looking into how they will look in reality and creating interaction with virtual ants.

References 

“Ants’ Body Odor, Physical Contact Get Worker Ants Working, Study Finds”, n.d. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2003/may7/antchat-57.html.

“Questions About Ant Pheromones « Wild About Ants”, n.d. http://blog.wildaboutants.com/2010/06/27/questions-about-ant-pheromones/.

“Questions About Ant Pheromones « Wild About Ants”, n.d. http://blog.wildaboutants.com/2010/06/27/questions-about-ant-pheromones/.

Wikipedia contributors. “Ant.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., May 11, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ant&oldid=490208767.