Week 6: Project 2 Proposal

Part 1:
The web-space is a dimension that gives people the ability to traverse from place to place but without having to traverse any physical distance. We want to closely investigate the perceived efficiency of traversing different places in cyberspace and how this compares to traversing in the physical world.

Part 2:
The pod cast will investigate the online cyber world. Often we feel as if we’re in an actual physical space while surfing online. However we’re still in the physical presence of our home using a computer. For instance a person shopping online can feel as if the person is shopping at a physical store, playing a massive online video game may entitle the person to believe he or she is in a physical fantasy world. Video conferencing may create a very similar atmosphere to an actual face to face conference in a physical conference room.

In our pod cast video, we will focus on the physical experience on online shopping and how it transforms our shopping culture. We would like to question on the several aspects or advantages of online shopping, such as time saving, and to investigate how well we spend our "saved" time on other activities and how our online shopping orders AFFECT our shopping experience as compared to the physical shopping. We might conduct street interviews or survey on how people's satisfactory level of receiving the goods is affected depends on the waiting time.

Part3:
We will use many different research techniques to help support, enhance, and elaborate on our idea. We will include field research such as surveys, questionnaires, and naturalistic observations. This will help us get a large sample of data that we can compile and examine.

We will also use some text books to help support our information such as the text book “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”. This text book offers us insight on how the web influences our perception of time and space. It looks directly at our topic of why we perceive the Web as space and how distance is eliminated by it. It also offers a lot of other interesting information that we may incorporate into our project such as the Web giving us a sense of realism and togetherness.

Other information sources that we may use are articles found on the Internet, newspaper articles and notes from courses that are relevant to our topic. For CCT260, we dealt with similar topics regarding how the Web makes the globe smaller because it helps eliminate distance. An example brought up in a lecture slide was Online Learning, which offers virtual classrooms that help students that live in rural areas be able to attend school without having to travel long distances.

For references, we will use movies such as “Click”, and all our gathered resources from our research. We will try to draw from as much sources as possible to help guide and support our topic and podcast.

Part4:
We would like to make our podcast very precise and informative for our viewers. We would like to make this a short documentary of some sort. Since we are going to conduct surveys by using questionnaires, we feel that it will be important to conduct a few interviews and make this a part of our podcast as well. We will also have a head style segment where the presenter can talk about facts. Narration will be a crucial part of our podcast since a great deal of information will be passed onto the viewer making the podcast informative, enlightening and persuasive.

The podcast will consist of four main parts, each roughly equally in length. In the first part we will propose our question to the viewing audience. For example, Are virtual spaces a good substitute for the experience that physical spaces provide? In the second part we will showcase our process of surveys and interviews. Here we will focus on what questions we asked and why we asked them. The third part will include some interviews and narration. In the fourth and final part we will discuss our findings and the answers to the questions we initially proposed.

Week 5: My Team

Team Awesome

Initial Concept:

Technology Influences
We love shopping, as there are more reliable online shopping places on the Internet, we tend to shift our shopping spaces from physical to virtual. Our team would like to investigate on the impacts and consequences of online shopping as we will discuss it further in our proposal.

Members:
Chen, Yingjia Rainie:
Editing, Directing, Research

Ho, Henry
Acting, Research

Nath, Saurab
Filming, Write-up, Research

Wang, Ken
Directing, Research

Wong, Cindy Wing Yee
Editing, Acting, Research

Week 4: What makes a good video podcast? A Review of My Fav.

The podcast Broken Pixels that is featured at PodcastPickle is one of the funniest podcast that I have watched. It offers a very interesting outlook on horrible and outdated video games that we all have once played when we were younger.

The episode I watched was titled China Warrior and Air Cars. The podcasts consists of three people that judge the game they are playing as they play. There weren't any scripts or guidelines during the podcast, as many of their commentary were from different scenes throughout the game. When something weird, exciting, crazy, or just stupid happens, they will make a joke about it. This podcast attempts to shed light on video games that are no longer around or have fallen off the earth, which also adds to the comedy.

The podcast's atmosphere very simple and reminded me of when I was young. Playing video games on a couch with friends, and cracking jokes as we play pretty much sums up the podcast. For viewers like me that had a childhood that revolved around playing video games (Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis), we will feel a connection with this podcast because that is where we spent most of our childhoods. Also, having the cast make fun of terrible games, reminds us of the times we have been tricked by the "hype" of games or the pictures on the cover just to find out the game is plain garbage.

The play by play commentary helped me remain interested throughout the video. But to ensure that the viewers aren't just watching the video game as they play, they would have the cast appear every so often in the background of the game in a light watermark color. This effect was very appealing because you could see both the game and the reactions of the cast as they play the game. Some of the reactions by the cast, like scene where one of the cast's "China Warrior" gets killed by a potato were hilarious.

The podcast Broken Pixel is definitely one of my favorite podcasts because of the content and how they present it. Though there will be people that won't understand because they have never played a terrible game or shared their childhood with crappy graphics, there will always be people like me that appreciate this type of humor. Hopefully they will make reviews on newer games on newer systems that are completely trash.