Week 2 - Designing Prototypes

In the contact this week we discussed devices that we regularly use at home. One of the devices that was mentioned was monitor calibration devices. It got me thinking about the way that I have to interact with said monitor calibrator. Generally speaking the device is placed against the screen and then software on the computer activates the device. While this is happening you have to sit there and wait for the calibration to finish. I was thinking of someway to more closely replicate the way a human would look at the screen. We don't have our face pushed up against the screen. We sit back look at the screen from a distance. What makes calibration so annoying is that it is required regularly as the monitor's colours shift around.

My idea is to utilise a form of augmented reality glasses  that would remove the need for calibration entirely. The glasses would be wirelessly communicating with the computer so that it knows what colours are meant to be displayed and then utilises colour-shifting on a HUD on the inside of the glasses. This way the glasses could be constantly calibrating the monitor during normal operation. It would remove the need completely for a monitor calibrator.

In order to prototype whether a glasses solution would be possible, I would first calibrate a monitor to a very bad calibration and then utilise something simple like combinations of very lightly tinted cellophane. If that was considered to work well, I would move on to a google glasses application that could be run.

http://www.google.com/glass/start/how-it-looks/