Xtension: Future of Senses
The project goal we set ourselves was actually quite simple: make someone feel superhuman. The caveat being that we had 14 weeks to do so.I won’t say that we had underestimated the task at hand, because we did not. We knew all too well the herculean task that we had given ourselves of achieving what is, in all honesty, verging on impossibility. But taking on impossible tasks has its mystic lure, something that I and Anton (designer & co-developer of the pitch idea) took full advantage of when convincing some of our cohort to join our cause.
We set aside the first 4 weeks to prototype and experiment with various input and output gadgets, taping thermal cameras onto makeshift helmets, strapping breadboards with ultrasonic sensors on our arms, and remotely controlling LEDs with a webcam through hand gesture recognition. The most significant insight we had gained from all of this was not what we had anticipated, or perhaps hoped, to learn. Humans are already ‘superhuman’.
Our hands are remarkable at not just identifying shapes and texture, but also invisible elements such as heat. Our ears easily pick up on sounds generated by our feet, informing us of the nature of the surface we walk on. The power of our eyes can be measured by the fact that they have dictated the way we construct our environments. Olfactory and taste often go underappreciated, and its effects on our emotional and mental state goes far beyond sensing flowery scents and acidic flavors.
What this amounted to was that the proposition of wearable technology is compelling not because it can sense what our sensorium is unable to, but rather because it can extend and even augment our existing sensorium.
This lesson profoundly changed the way we approached interaction design as we began developing the guest experience. We will not diminish existing human senses. We will not artificially take away what we already have. Wearables should enhance what we already have. They should extend our existing capabilities. This was great. We understood what had to be done, but there still remained a question.
Why?
Why must we steer the spaceship with our hands in the air, when a steering wheel would suffice? Why must we extend our arm to move the spaceship forward, when a throttle stick would suffice? Why must we feel the damage sustained on the spaceship, when a visual healthbar would suffice?
These questions could have undermined our entire project, had we set ourselves with designing the next wearable gadget to be launched in year 2025. But Xtension was never about launching a product. It was not about “solving a problem”. The questions did not undermine, but rather fueled the drive of our project and its relevance.
Xtension was about imagining, designing, and building a future that provokes a conversation around technological advancement, and our role in that future. We imagined a future, one in which hostile environments are overcome through technological advancement. A future where humanity is not reduced to a passive role; its destiny delegated to circuitry and algorithms, but where humans have redefined its relationship with machines as cooperative extensions of one another, propelling human capabilities beyond ‘superhuman’.
The spaceship the guests control in Xtension is not a disparate entity, but an extension of the guests themselves. What the ship feels, the guests feel. The guests do not command the ship to move, they command themselves to move. The ship does not react to guests’ input, it is the input; the output being the impact it has on its environment.
Xtension was a challenging project in more ways than one. Yes, we had to deliver a complete experience for a festival to a live audience. Yes, we had to ensure hardware robustness. Yes, the experience had to be fun.
But the project was not just a game-design experience. It was a giant speculative design exercise, pushing and challenging our existing notions of a technologically advanced future, and what that would mean for human relevance. I truly value these design exercises: ones that seem farfetched and sometimes even bizarre but provoke very real and grounded conversations.
We do not know which future will be presented to us. But we built one, and shared it with the world.
And that’s pretty cool.