Ants
Setting up a Trap
Instructor: Sean Donahue/ Ben Hooker Group members: Julianne Weiss/ Hyemi Kim
ANTS is our trap project that experiments human curiosity. This experiment had a very simple and immediate goal - to get people to look in a peep hole. To trap the user.
Device: A Petri Dish filled with red ants.
The Setup: A viewing station secretly equipped with a proximity sensor, a live video feed and a projector. We built a mysterious and ambivalent viewing station for our little petri dish of ants. The "helping hand" magnifying glass sat atop for ant spying purposes and micro video footage was projected across the way.
The Payoff: When a user steps up to the viewing station to see the ants, the proximity sensor detects them and switches the video projection to show a live video shot from beneath the petri dish.
We played with role reversal here so the user would be inspected unknowingly by onlookers. People suspected a change would occur when they looked into the dish, but by the time they lifted their head up to see the screen, the sensor would stop detecting them and video would go back to the pre-recorded footage.
- Here, we learned that the user likes to be in control. If they can tell something fishy is happening, they will do spend all of their energy trying to solve the riddle of how the interaction works rather than simply interact with the model.
- The smoother the system, the less people will try to break it down.
