Final Project Update

While working on my final project this week, I spent time thinking about how much control the user should have over the experience. Ultimately, I decided the user shouldn't have any input or control over the experience because the experience is only given meaning if it is passive; it's indicative of the way we consume our news. We do not have a say in what news is reported to us.

After making this decision, I experimented with a few concepts:
1) I considered allowing the user to input an article, allow them to choose from an assortment of articles, or random select an article to be read to the user. I ultimately decided to randomly select an article to be read to the user because it best matches the passive experience I want to create - as I described above.
2) The second consideration I had was giving the audience time to prepare, so the website would prompt the user to click a button to enter the experience. After trying this idea and asking people for feedback, I decided it was very confusing. Instead, I think it is a better experience to dive right into and figure out what is going on.
3) I changed the program design. Before, the program would read the entire article and display the same color spheres. I changed it so as each sentence is read off, the sentiment of the sentence is calculated and the color is changed accordingly - either blue for positive or red for negative.
4) I considered displaying text in the 'wormhole' and other objects.  After playing around with 3D and 2D objects insertion into the experience, I found that the objects took away from the experience.

The last concept I am thinking about and have to make a decision about is the source of the articles:
- Select news articles from a free news site.
- Use the articles I scraped from the Brown Daily Herald and choose a random one.
- Generate random fake articles from a news source

The final step in my project is to make a decision on the last concept and implement it!

You can view the current iteration of my project here: http://aanshshah.com/dla_final_project/

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