dejiezhen / soft_fascination

Soft_Fascination

https://dejiezhen.github.io/Soft_Fascination/

Overview

This project is based on the idea of soft fascination. Soft fascination is an effortless control of attention and can help reduce mental bandwidth/mental fatigue. For example, when we walk through the woods, we feel at peace and can think deeply because there is nothing that is forcefully grabbing our attention. This peacefulness allows our mind to rest, which reduces our mental stress. I wanted to play with this idea and create art that promotes soft fascination through the use of color noises. In the creator environment, users create bubbles that mimics our thoughts. When we move and think, we create new thoughts, while the older thoughts disappear because we have limited mental capacity -- humans can only hold 5+-2 thoughts at once. However, if the user is not moving the cursor, the bubbles will free roam without generating new bubbles which represents our brain helping to recover our mental fatigue since we do not have anything forcefully grabbing our attention. The users can change noises by left clicking, accelerate bubble movement with up arrow and decelerate bubble movement with down arrow. Users can play around with how the bubbles are connecting together and getting generated with the mouse. The users can move the mouse as fast as they can to create mesmerizing art. They can save the art by pressing "S" which will download a jpg onto your computer. Everyone has full control of what they want to do while experiencing relaxing background noise.

Here are the benefits of each noise:

• White Noise: concentration for working and studying
• Green Noise: calming effects for relaxation
• Pink Noise: better sleep
• Black Noise: silence, total concentration
• Brown Noise: relaxation, improved focus, better sleep

Features

• UP arrow key === bubble acceleration
• DOWN arrow key === bubble deceleartion
• P key === pause screen
• S key === screenshot of your art!
• Left mouse click === change noise
• AFK === bubbles free roam
• Any key if paused === unpause screen

Reflection

I initially learned about this concept of soft fascination in my cognitive architecture class. Since learning about soft fascination, I've been interested in learning the different ways to reduce my mental fatigue. I remember reading about color noises in the past and I thought this concept was interesting. This project idea came into fruition because I was mentally drained during finals week. I wanted to create something that would help other students and myself through these difficult weeks. For this project, I incorporated ideas of soft fascination and color noises that people can use for different purposes. People could leave the website on the screen and select which noise they want to listen to. The bubbles that gets generated is relaxing and mesmerizing (hopefully not too distracting)!

This system challenged me as a computer scientist because it made me think of ways to solve problems that I and other people may currently be facing. This idea came up because I wanted to help others reduce their mental fatigue during finals week. Furthermore, working on this system taught me to be intentional in what features I wanted to include. While it is cool to make amazing effects, I also wanted to limit the amount of possibles because the theme of my project is relaxation. The creators should feel relaxed and get into their flow state while creating art. Thus, I didn't include too many special effects which would have defeated the purpose of soft fascination. Being intentional is an important challenge for me because I often get wrapped up in wanting to include all the special effects and make the system as cool as possible. However, stepping back and truly understanding the purpose of this idea helped me focus on the bigger picture. Moving forward, I will define a purpose for each project idea and try to list out features that are necessary without overcomplicating the system. By doing this, I can avoid falling into the trap of wanting to include every feature possible.

Bugs

There should not be any bugs in my system. Due to Google's Autoplay policy (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay/#iframe-delegation), the first load will not autoplay the noise unless you have modified your autoplay settings. Otherwise, the noises should start playing after clicking past the first load. If you want to autoplay the sound on first load, please follow these instructions on chrome.

1. Settings
2. Privacy and Security
3. Site settings
4. Click additional content settings under 'content'
5. Click Sound
6. Please add your local live server or https://dejiezhen.github.io/Soft_Fascination/ if viewing on pages

Credits

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae4O-a0ku_A&ab_channel=Giveitalisten (Green Noise)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT0Ta_Qldrs&ab_channel=crysknife007 (Brown Noise)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzmSKX5TF3g&ab_channel=WhiteNoise-Topic (White Noise)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlqPmySO9Sg&ab_channel=ChillMachine-Topic (Pink Noise)
• https://codepen.io/franksLaboratory/pen/zYvGWMY (Bubble Line Idea)
• https://p5js.org/