Today we discussed in class our next project: an interactive children's project. We decided to go with entertainment and make a 2D storybook with a female knight who is to save a prince from his castle only to find that he's not a cool dude and rides off on a dragon in the end.
We sketched out a couple concept ideas and Vanessa posted on her blog a lot of good examples:
We want to possibly emulate a sort of hallmark singing/light up cards but require interactions such as sound and touch in order to progress the story and make it come alive.
an example of an interactive art book (even though it is digital, it's a good example of what we want to experiment with physically)
an example of how we could program the sound and lights
an example of touch senors used on fabric as opposed to paper
Today we were tasked with creating a circuit and program an arduino to make something that's switch was a button clasp. We chose to make a bracelet with an LED in the middle.
Our first assignment was to not only create a parallel circuit that would light up six LEDs but to design it. We were to incorporate a sort of poetic aesthetic involving paper.
Our first attempt was not fruitful; we worked tirelessly for hours on a circuit that was not working for reasons we still could not figure out.
The concept was a body of water with waves and lilies that would have a boat that would house the batteries and would act as the switch when slid over .
We decided to redo our concept and instead of the environment being a body of water, we made it a lawn with grass and the same lilies. The switch was a push lawn mower that also hid the batteries.
I worked on trying to get multiple cats to fall. It took a lot of trial and error to get it working properly. It still flashes a bit and all of the images are the same (I spent hours trying to figure out how to make the images different) but the randomization of the x values does work.
Yesterday we worked out the particulars of our concept and had a lot of great help from Morgan. We were able to work out the falling images (in this case, kittens and puppies) and have it overlay onto the webcam feed.
The theme for our interactive narrative project is "touching space". We derived our inspiration from "Text Rain" but instead of falling letters, we were thinking of "raining cats and dogs".
Initially, we discussed the idea of a more morbid kind of installation with the cats and dogs making sad dying noises as they exited the frame at the bottom of the screen. However, we thought it would be far more enjoyable if we made the cats and dogs turn into "flowers" once they reached the bottom.
We will also incorporate an umbrella which we will color track the speed at which it is moving. The dogs and cats will slide off of the umbrella and fall to the bottom. The faster the umbrella is waved around, the more cats and dogs will start falling, etc.
The message we wanted to go with this interactive project is to spay and neuter your pets. There are a lot of stray cats and dogs leading to overpopulation of these animals. It's very sad to hear about how many of them have to be put down because there just isn't enough funding/supplies/staff to take care of them all. Simply put, there isn't enough "space" which is how we will tie our concept into the theme.
We might also make the dog flowers and cats pile up as it keeps raining which also creates less space on the screen.
This piece is The Wooden Mirror that uses a camera to see people who walk up to it. The wooden plates have three different ways they can move: upward they are bright, in the middle, they are a middle tone, and downward they are dark. The camera picks up the image of the people that come close to it and the wooden tiles are motorized so they change to look like the person's face. I am really inspired by the natural material used in this interactive piece and the really cool sound that is a byproduct of the tiles moving.
This is a piece made by Converse that uses Converse Chuck Taylor shoes that are half red and half white. The basic principle is the same as the wooden mirror but they also use different graphics and images to show up on the screen in reaction to sound. I am inspired by the graphics that they use with this interactive piece.
This is a piece called ACCESS by Marie Sester "that lets web users track anonymous individuals in public places, by pursuing them with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system". It's very creepy and cool in that millions of people were watching these individuals getting tracked by the spotlight. I was inspired by the remoteness and randomness of this piece.
We were tasked with making an interactive piece that can track something.
I chose to track a color (in this instance, I used a bright green scissors) and change the saturation and the slide up and slide down.
Today we were tasked with creating a patch in Max that manipulated a webcam input in any fashion we found to be cool and interesting.
I created a patch that made the webcam input have a ghosting effect. I believe with a little more knowledge of how Max works, I could create a patch that would allow a user to be able to use their entire body to paint on a display (projector, tv, computer monitor, etc.). I feel an ideal set-up would be a white background so the colors of the clothing the user is wearing stands out and allows for more contrast on the display.
I tried other effects such as jit.tiffany and jit.wake but they made it difficult to see the ghosting effect which is what I wanted to be in the spotlight.
The article proved to be a rather difficult read; there was a lot of technical jargon I was unfamiliar with. However, I understood it to be about "A-life" known as Artificial life which encompasses human-computer interaction and the experience that is specifically designed and created in relationship to these interactions. It includes many theories and algorithms and sciences such as the chaos theory and theoretical biology. A-life can be anything from what we would normally call a robot (something that has a motor and/or sensors, etc.) to things that seem to be projections and installations, to things that are robotic but look nothing like what we would normally call a robot.
Specific to this article was the introduction of a new way to view such designed human-computer interactive experiences that is rid of the commonly used computer or television screens by using fiber-optic cables. The article then goes on to say that there is an aesthetic to human-computer interactive experiences because it is designed which that in mind and thus the elimination of commonly used boxy screens and their replacement with fiber optic cables and other materials allows for a different experience.. The meaning of aesthetics is discussed to encompass visual appearance and can be a design feature or element. The authors of this article describe their aesthetics as "the aesthetic of emergence" or, rather, "the embodied, situated participatory actions of both human and virtual agents".
So this is it! Our final stop motion video. All-in-all, I feel like we did an awesome job. The project was a hefty workload but incredibly rewarding and fun to create. I thoroughly enjoyed creating the sets and adding little details and such (like caution signs and putting our names on some of the posters). The animating was very tedious, as was expected, and was my least favorite part of the project but it was well worth it. Going back and doing scenes or takes over was slightly aggravating (I just like to get things done!) but we did it anyway because we really wanted our stop motion to be the best work we could create.
We started and finished filming the Woodshop scene along with the opening title sequence of the polaroids and the end credits. The lag on the computer in Studio B while using DragonFrame was lengthening the time it took to do simple movements which was rather frustrating.
We then went on to the editing process and, while we had most of our sounds picked out, there were a couple that we didn't think about. We asked a couple of people in studio to chant "Chug, chug, chug" fr the opening sequence which worked out really well.
We finished up all of the sets and were able to film the hallway scene and the bar scene.
The beer cans on the bar table proved difficult to keep in the same place at times and required a steady hand to continue to put them back in the same position.
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