Compare/contrast project

Select a work for comparison

The project Handsight was created by the artist Agnes Hegedus in 1990. This work consists of a dark room with a projection on the wall also located in the middle of the room is a transparent bowl and a hand held eye. By placing the eye in the bowl the user can explore the virtual environment projected on the wall by moving the eye. This project is meant to create is link between the physical world and the virtual world as told by a Handsight summary.

“The work creates a correlation of the physical world and the virtual world.”

(http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/leaf/other/.xslt/nodenr-155831)

The reason I have chosen this particular work is because it explores the virtual world and does it in a way that is different from the typical screen/keyboard/mouse interaction. By the user of the eye in a particular environment (that of the glass bowl) the user is exploring different interactions. This work is also immersing in the respect they have control of where they are going in the world. This work also has the potential to go to another level of immersion as well. What this project does as well is gives the user an opportunity to play in exploring the virtual world because there is a world to see as well as a different way of interaction makes the user more accepting of new technology and makes them think about how it could all work and also adds to the immersion factor of the project.

Project Links

http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/work/.xslt/nodenr-146808

http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/leaf/other/.xslt/nodenr-155831 

Week 8 (i think): Progress

This week we though of a few more ideas such as having dry leaves over the floor to theme the area. With trees which could possibly be real or fake (depends on what the art gallery will allow as well). Also we have decided to use Damian’s old assignment structure to keep the project contained in. This structure is pretty much a black room with an area to hide a projector. Of course depending of area constrictions this would still be a great structure especially for the initial presentation. We also thought that having character profiles mounted on cardboard outside the structure would be great to get people interested in what we had done.

Also we broke up some different tasks to do. I am audio man now. Worked out some programs that could do surround sound, these include puredata and flash, Max MSP, Processing and Jahshaka. So far i have attempted to do the surround sound in Jahshaka and Processing without much luck so far. In Jahshaka i managed to import sound into it but wasn’t able to work out the speaker control so I have posted to the forum’s but have yet to be given a reply. Processing mentioned some surround sound in the forums but they involved external programs running as well. What my next attempt will be is Max MSP which apparently is quite good.

Week 7: Idea progression

This week we discussed about the ideas about how the story would progress. Such as how many decisions we wanted the user to create, whether they continued on separate paths or whether some actions can eventually lead to a similar conclusion. I’m kind of thinking that we need to have quite a few decisions amongst the storyline progression to keep the user interacting and not getting distracted.  Another idea I had actually today would be to have just a  singular object that manipulates the interface.  But this controller reacts to rotation and acceleration so its just a general devise, the devise could be on a pedestal or inside another object to make it interesting. Still need to confirm the scariness level. Need to look into that sound program and try and get the surround sound going.

Ipswich Art Gallery

The Ipswich art galleries current exhibition Experimenta: Vanishing Point had many interesting works from “Australian and international digital artists, filmmakers, scientists, video artists, animations and sound artists” (http://www.ipswichartgallery.qld.gov.au/current_exhibitions/experimenta/index.php) Some of the works that were presented included a photo frame or window on the wall which detected the movements of people around them, the characters in the photo frame then reacted to the movement of the users in the space. Another work consisted of a small round table with different objects on it like a small garden spade and scissors. When the user touches these objects a animation that is projected onto the table is created. One other work was a  projected on a wall was a house with a flood funning through it which looked really interesting. Other works were short videos, and animations of interesting concepts. One works also tried to recreate the feeling of meditation under a waterfall by having particles bouncing of the shadow of the interacted. Good Exhibit.

Week 6: Easter Break

We discussed together that doing motion tracking while it would be good is more likely to have problems. We haven’t completely rules it out yet but we are thinking of a simpler approach to this such as touch pads that are well hidden. But still discussing possible ways of doing this. I looked again at the coding this week but didn’t really get that far. I’m going to look at some more tutorials for this. Decided to do a 3rd person instead of 1st person. Need to get final idea down soon.  This coming week I’m going to look into the sound parts of the assignment as well.

Week 5: Technological Stuff

Hey blog sorry about leaving you for so long. Now in week 5 after doing the presentation I got some information about the motion tracking with flash and a web-cam from the adobe website.  After looking at the finished example it did pick up the movement of the user but it doesn’t seem to have any sort of interface control. Then i went to the coding part. Looking through the coding i couldn’t find anything that could change an interface.  But it at least covered getting the web-cam image into flash. This web-cam image would have to run in the background while images are over the top. Have to find out how to make the interface changed based on the movement yet.