HERIN HARAMOTO

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, our worlds were divided. People were made to live in their own bubbles, with little interaction with others. This project explored new ways to connect people’s worlds together.

Connecting Skies is a multi-player interactive experience where people can look into the sky, create their own constellations, and then stargaze at theirs and other people’s constellations. The experience is intended to leave people with a sense of belonging by leaving their own constellations in the sky as a repository and sharing a virtual stargazing experience with others. The platform is created with minimal interactions to simulate how people might typically stargaze with a group in-person. When the user click a button and see a myriad of constellations that they never thought they’d see, it reminds them that there are people, that there is something in the universe, and that sense of discovery makes them realize that they are part of a larger world. This project was first prototyped in p5.js at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and is now being prototyped in Unity for more immersive experiences.

1 - Draw constellations in the sky (Click each dots and connect them)

This project was first prototyped in P5.js at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in 2020. 

We brainstormed ideas for connecting people trapped indoors in a pandemic situation and envisioned the interactions that would accompany them.
During the iteration process, we stripped away direct interactions, such as conversations, that could occur between people. We kept the interaction to a minimum: creating constellations, naming them, and stargazing together. While replicating the actual act of stargazing, we also believe that meaningful experiences will lead to deeper connections between people, even if that is minimal interaction. This decision also came from rethinking how best to interact online as a result of us feeling drained with the amount of time we spend socializing online due to the pandemic.

With this project, I learned that developing the prototype on a daily basis was possible by dividing up tasks into small chunks while programming the interactions. This also helped us move as a team and allowed us to have productive and meaningful conversations on a daily basis and keep the project moving forward without burning out.

My next step was to create a new prototype using Unity. As I wanted to make the experience more immersive, I wanted to embody the project in VR.  This work is still in progress and I hope to do some user testing once the first prototype is done.