INSPIRATION

The astronauts in space will need to adapt to a very challenging environment, where they’ll be isolated, face periods of heavy workloads, be away from friends and family, won’t be able to breathe fresh air or even eat fresh food. They might experience sleep problems, due to the lack of natural light, as well as anxiety problems or depression. There's more; apart from these kinds of problems, factors such as microgravity, radiation or carbon dioxide may also debilitate their neurobehavioral and performance.

“We want to keep astronauts healthy or detect that they are starting to deviate from their baseline, so we can prevent it before it really affects them or the mission itself,” says Wu, Senior Biomedical Engineer at TRISH.

Therefore, after researching about how color and sound can affect people‘s mental health, I want to design a game that can help preventing the mental problem from happening. This game can make them relax and feel calm. Also, it can make them feel home.

Design Concept

Starting with the idea of helping with astronaunts mental health, I decided to design a game that can help astronauts relaxing themselves and dealing with the high anxiety level in space. Therefore, I decided to incorprate sound and color that have obvious impacts on astronauts emotions.

I started with 8 different music instruments to create different sounds. Each of them have three different pitches which are low pitches, mediant and high pitches. Each of the music instruments is symbolized by different color of circle. Therefore, when you drag the circle into the screen and release it, it starts to float in the screen and bounce back when it reaches the edge of the screen.

Color

When you drag one ball to collide with another one, the colors of the two balls start to mix and show the gradient effect of the two colors. If keep dragging the ball to collide with another ball, all the colors will be seen on the merged ball and creating the gradient effect.

I imagine that the people can interact with two systems. They are not only play the game on the screen, but they can also feel it in the real world. It can provide people with a more immersive experience.

MINDMAP

Each of the circle has its own sound and pitch. If you collide one circle with another one, the merged circle will be the sound of both of them coming together.

You could press the recording button and click on the balls that have already exist on the screen sequentially. Then hit the button pause. Then you could music that you have just composed. The sound will play sequentially and start to be a new song

Scent

The Scent System is connected to the game system. When you hit record button and chose the color balls sequentially, the scent system will remember the choices. When you hit play, it will release the scents which are given to the particular colors and mix them up. You’ll smell the scent while listening to your DIY music.

Key Features

Immersive

Game system and scent system come together to provide immersive experiences

Therapy

While playing the game, it is actually providing healing therapy to the astronauts staying in the space for a long time.

Real Life Application

Combining with the game and the scent, the whole system can help with enhacing astronauts’ working efficiency.