Pressure Project 2 (Murt)

For this project, I decided to work with some design elements which I did not use in PP1: set travel paths and pre-existing image assets. While I was able to get the Leap Motion functioning as I wanted it(almost), I ran out of time before I could get the trigger system set up.

I call this piece Kaiju vs. Yog-Sothoth even though two of the four available characters are American cartoon characters. The characters are: Gamera, Mothra, Reptar, and Daniel Tiger. The user is intended to select characters by moving a cursor(a six-fingered hand pointer). Each character tries to fight the Lovecraftian “Outer God” Yog-Sothoth. Only Daniel Tiger is successful. Emotional intelligence is somehow effective against Yog-Sothoth’s non-corporeal intrusion of our world.

The first of the two Isadora scenes is the character select screen which includes the Leap Motion system, shapes, and character PNGs.

The second scene is Gamera going up against Yog-Sothoth. YS is animated with Gaussian Blur and some random waves which control X/Y dimensions. Gamera is animated in scale and path, plus a chat bubble. There is one additional animation which occurs after Gamera’s charge.

It would have been nice to see this finished, but I think what I was able to come up with is fun in itself.

Pressure Project 1 (Murt)

For PP1, my first area of concern was finding that moment of delight. I thought about the sorts of things that many people find delightful that also fit the resources which I possessed as a novice Isadora user. I settled on bubbles or balloons.

I created user actors for bubbles of various size, shape and color. Two of the bubbles explode and appear randomly. All of the bubbles initialize at random locations and oscillate vertically and horizontally on a sine wave. Each bubble also has random values feeding a Color Maker. The exploding bubble user actor above has an EnvGen controlling the Alpha channel. Some bubbles have their Facet value controlled by a Table to create star polygons. One of these stars has a WaveGen oscillating its Odd Inset value. I used five different scenes to cycle through the bubbles and to create an infinite sequence. I also made a control page with buttons for “GO” and “Stop”

The result is something that resembles a screen saver.

When I took Fundamentals of Media Design in the Theatre Department, one of our assignments was to move shapes around the screen using AE. This put the shapes onto a definite path, which is something I wanted to avoid with PP1. Perhaps I could have replaced one of the exploding bubbles with one which would follow a path but appear randomly.

Overall I found this project useful for learning workflows within Isadora, especially scene changes and control screens.

Pressure Project 1 (Sean)

I used my time based pressure project to create a scene of the sun rise fading into a moon rise. I found an image of a big grass field with a few trees scattered around as a background. I had to do some photoshop work to layer the image so that the sun would appear to come up over the horizon and move across the sky. I played with the transparency and the opacity of the image to try and get it to appear as one.

This was really an opportunity to test what I thought I knew about Isadora and to try and recreate some of the actors we had covered in class. I began by playing with the Shapes actor to create the two celestial bodies that would move across the sky – the sun and the moon. I started by trying to figure out how to have them in the same scene and just follow each other, but then I was eating lunch and I had the idea I could make DIFFERENT scenes and that might just make the project more clean.

So I made two scenes. A sun rise and a moon rise. I adjusted the fascets and the odd insert setting on the shapes actor to create the sun and moon in different scenes. I knew that I wanted them to move with a deliberate slowness over the course of an extended duration. I messed quite a bit with the timing output of the wave generators to make them move across the sky at the tempo I desired.

Then next step was to synchronize the increasing and decreasing intensity of the background image to make it appear as thought the sun and the moon were rising. I found myself working again with the wave generator and learning how to change the min/max output and initilizing the setting so that the value when up or down how I wanted to see them

Next, I wanted to have some overlapping stars in the sky to create the illusion that they were contiguous scenes. Shapes actor again set the fascets and odd insert high. I used a random wave generator to give the stars a twinkling quality and used what I had learned about the inverting the value of the intensity to make them appear and disappear as the sun rose.

I was trying to create the effect of lady bugs in my daytime scene that would disappear as it got dark, but I couldn’t get them where I wanted them. We adjusted these settings in class and now I think I have a better understanding of how those actors were talking to each other and how to address that in the future.

Project Bump – Sean

Project Bump – Maria

I really enjoyed the task of creating a “fortune teller machine” for this pressure project. I have no idea how I would make it myself (although I think I could probably figure it out if I spent some time playing around), but I thought it was a really cool application of the interactivity of what Isadora allows!

Reading this student’s reflection revealed a variety of issues that I will probably run into in my own pressure projects, like spending several hours trying to find a specific actor, or making a patch much more complex than it actually needs to be. It’s good to be reminded that these are part of everyone’s learning processes and I shouldn’t let them get me down if I run into them myslef 🙂

Project Bump (Sara)

I scrolled backwards through time to find a project that caught my eye, but I found myself somewhat overwhelmed by the myriad techniques and technologies on display that we have not yet discussed in class. For my own peace of mind (and, admittedly, to satisfy my curiosity), I then clicked on my former peer Taylor’s subsection to scope out his very first Pressure Project in the course.

As is to be expected from one of the most cerebral people I have known, even Taylor’s first foray into Isadora was technically-challenging and highly interactive. What most struck me about the work, though, was his writing in relation to it. He speaks frankly about frustrations, fiddling, and failures even in the midst of what evolved into a successful work. And honestly, I found this to be encouraging. Yes, I will undoubtedly, most assuredly bump into any number of walls as I try to cobble something “delightful” together in five hours. But, given that hard and fast time constraint, rather than try to punch the wall down with my fists, I’ll need to circumnavigate these barriers to keep moving forward. Taylor mentioned that the time limitation led him to make “simpler choices.” I’ll keep that in mind and try to do the same.

MByrne Bump

https://dems.asc.ohio-state.edu/?p=2597

Here we have an interactive photo-booth design that allows the user to place themselves in a setting and costume of their choosing. I resonated with Matt’s project since I am interested in bringing XR elements into live music performance, especially with the sudden prevalence of virtual events. Infected Mushroom did a tour with XR and projection mapping at least 5 years ago, but they did a one-off virtual event more in-line with this back in November.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElFL6JswhIQ

Project Bump

I selected Emily Pickens’s third pressure project. The concept and execution are very simple, but I found it to be a very fun interactive object. It is a box with several touch sensitive spots on it that when touched play a different sound. It uses the makey makey and has the user keep one hand on ground while exploring the box with their other. The Isaodra setup seems quite straightforward, but I think there are so many ways one could further this idea and have different touchpoints trigger a variety of feedback. Maybe the box vibrates when you touch one area. Or flashes a color from the inside at another.