Week 9 - Expo Critique

As I had work the night before, I accidentally missed my alarm, so wasn't able to come through with my group - which in hindsight was quite good as it meant I gained a different perspective on the expo to the other members of six chicks. I came through the expo with the last group of teams and one aspect that I found particularly annoying was that a number of teams had either already packed up or started packing up before the last groups had even come through, this meant I didn't get to experience a number of stalls (which some of these my team considered to be the best stalls).

I think on a whole this expo addressed the dream/rapid eye movement theme well, with many of the stalls referencing what your dream is in a light sleepy sense, whilst others had more of a dark mysterious take on this, one stall that I found particularly unique was you were given the choice of a dream, either immortality, wealth or power.. you then went inside a tent and were shown the negative side of your dream. I chose wealth, but effectively learned about all the reasons I wouldn't want to be wealthy which was quite cool. My favourite stall from this expo was the VR one in which you had to fill out a survey before it was determined whether or not you could enter. I know a number of people were disheartened to be denied going in. However, I was lucky enough to be selected. As you went through you saw a number of different landscapes, it was my first experience with VR so it was a really unique one, at the very end you saw what I think was a bear jump out at you and through the headphones you heard a gasp, I quite literally gasped out loud. To go from such a calm state to such a fright was really clever and totally fit with the rapid eye movement theme. Another stall that fit this them well was the one where they placed a box over your head and tapped on the box etc. what I found really interesting about this was that you were so focussed on the immersive experience that when the box was removed from your head you didn't even recognise that everyone had had neon dots placed on their backs. 

From the expo as a whole the points that frustrated me the most was the number of lines you had to wait in to even get into some of the stalls and the fact that due to them trying to shorten lines you ended up missing out on some of the better stalls. Also the fact that the expo was packed up so quickly meant that I couldn't comment on some of the things that my group really liked as I never got to experience them.