Week 9: Progress

This week we met up again and shared our progress, so far I still haven’t had any luck with the surround sound, Damien had a refined storyline and Andrew had done some illustrations for the character profile posters. Today we just went over a few ideas and then decided to record the little red riding hood story, so we did this with the help of Jess who offered to do the female voices (might have been a good thing) . After this I have done some more work on trying to get this surround sound working, i have some tutorials about using max msp but have yet to find anything relating to surround sound. Have got a forum reply from Jahshaka so hopefully they can give me some insight. Other then that I’m just cleaning up the audio recordings and organizing them so they can be placed with the corresponding images. Might try to do some of the music tracks in stereo for now but we shall see what progress i make with the 5.1. Goodnight.

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.

Update

Well our group completed the report and the presentation. Both of which I think went quite well.  What arose from the presentation was to think of a good way to do user testing and to gauge the scariness  of the story. We had discussed about how scary we could make the story, while we can sort of speculate how scary it would be for a child its a bit hard to tell. So were going to need to work that out fully.

Report

Intended audience and experience:

The intended audience for our project is kids aged 8 – 10 year olds. This age group allows us to add content that may be a little more scary, exciting and thought provoking than an age group that is below 8 years old. Kids are also interesting to work with as they have short attention spans and different ways of thinking. There is also a children’s exhibit in the Ipswich art gallery which is another reason for focusing on children. User testing will be crucial to make sure the children are interested.

The experience we want the children to have is a fun interactive experience where the user fields apart of the virtual environment. The user should get a feeling that they are in control of what is happening, as well as get the feeling they are in the environment.

We intend this experience to happen using a combination of sight, sound and feel. Sight will be used to have visuals to focus upon and then control. Sound is going to be used creatively to make the environment seem more realistic. And feeling will be used to add to the given scene by having a fan blow near a cliff for example. Also by theming the space will the user be able to feel part of the adventure.

Project Constraints:

The project will have several constraints associated with it. Time is one constraint which will influence what can and can’t be done. Bad time management on a project can lead to it being unable to be completed. Space in another issue as the Ipswich art gallery space is limited this means that if our project is to big then the project will not be able to go into the gallery or the project would have to be modifed. Technology is another constraint, technology will limit us if there is not enough equipment between all the groups and also limititations and problems with equipment need to be addresses.

Background Material

 Background material:

There are various works based on virtual environments. There are different types of virtual environments such as virtual reality, games and interactive art installations to name a few. One interactive art work called handsight is relevant to our project as it involves manipulating a virtual environment with the use of an eye placed within a glass bowl. When the eye is moved around the bowl the user can view around the virtual world projected on the wall. As our project involves traveling thought the story via movement or a devise the Handsight project is a very relevant project. Our ideas build on the Handsight project by having the user manipulate the space with there own movement whether it be by waving your arms or by moving through the space rather then having a single rotatory movement to view the virtual environment. Because of this the user gets a greater feeling of involvement especially when that movement makes an impact on where the character goes and what the character does.

Other works have also been developed that use motion tracking devises are Untitled 5 by Cimille Utterback. This project detects physical movement and creates a changing wall projection from this. This is related to our project we also want a project to react to what a user does. But differs because of the experience we want the users to have. Our project desired to make a complete environment with the use of audio and a themed environment.

Links: Untitled 5. http://www.camilleutterback.com/

Here is another link that I am still looking through that has some information about motion tracking. And 3D interface design. Search for motion tracking I think.

 http://eprints.cs.vt.edu/archive/00000548/01/3dui_presence.pdf

 Little Red Riding Hood: Story and meaning.

Week 4: Group Meeting Progress

Kids attention span.

Movement.

Theming environment from the outside could be really interesting could have different areas they have to move to at certain points in the story. Could instead of having the moving of the arms of an item the user could walk on sensors on the group that are disguised as paths that lead to different themed areas like the forest or grandmas house. The different places you walk changes the position of the character on the projection. This is complete with cool sound, fans and stuff to add dimension.  Problems: Need a big area mainly.

Character introduction, maybe as they are introduced like in need for speed most wanted with a cool animation.

Mood: Creepy, Cross genre characters.  Such as introducing Aladin orShrek into the little red riding hood story. Moral at the end.

Want the mood to be as immersing as games are.

Focus fun.

Need to do usability testing with kids to make sure they understand whats going on the whole time.l

Hands on screen to show where the user is.

How to use introduction sequence.
Story should be scary but no to scary.