Hello,

After spending months on thinking and prototyping different mini projects, I came up with an idea of creating a brand and products which will be communicating with the user with its personalized artificial characters.

The first prototype I prepared and user tested is a series of faces that I designed on a toaster representing the artificial characters. I asked users to choose the one that they feel they can be comfortable with. By this way I will have a better understanding of what users would like to see as an artificial character that they may communicate easily.

Before user tests, I actually had a general idea that people will probably pick the more humanistic characters rather than the computer generated characters such as fractal images or vector animated characters. But that assumption was wrong. The choices that users made were very diverse. while some users mentioned they would like to see the cat and hear its murmuring or making unknown sounds, some users prefered to communicate with a non human character preferably a fractal animation.

Please click this link to go to the prototype page.

This blogged was created by me; Alpay Gumrukcu, for collecting my ideas and researches in one place for myself and my instructers to be able to see the progress of my Thesis Project at Parsons New School for Design Masters degree in Design and Technology.

I believe that movies have been a very important audio, visual communication pipeline in our lives. If we were to look at our history in all cultures, we will see that we were informed about aliens, wars, history, all kinds of interesting issues always by movies.

Sometimes, we agree sometimes we don’t but for about $10 we have that amazing luxury to see a 2 hours of highly concentrated information treasure, imagination and labour.

For a long time in the history before probably I can say internet; actors were one of the most important pieces of movies. They were so much important that, sometimes their names were used to explain a manner or a situation in some cultures.

For example, “making clark” expression in turkish which means acting like Clark Gable to attract women.

My thesis project that I am thinking about is the last 10-15 years of movie making and the weakening importance of celebrities and actors.

Development of technology has changed alot in movie making as well. Instead of seing famous celebrities, highly developed virtual character animation techniques have been changing our general movie understanding.

In my thesis, I would like to investigate, observe and research about this new way of acting and using computer generated actors and the ways to create them. After this first process, I would also like to dive in the consequences of this issue in a future spectrum in movie making business and acting sector.

You may find a detailed bibliography on bibliography page or simply click this link to reach there.

A.

Alpay Gumrukcu