Line Describing a Cone

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. This is Line Describing a Cone by Anthony McCall. It is a 30 minute 16mm film that is projected with a fog machine, making the light appear solid.

PP3: A Hidden Mystery

For Pressure Project 3 we were to reveal a hidden mystery in 3 minutes without a keyboard or mouse. Bonus levels were to make it unique to each user, have users move in a larger environment, and for users to express delight in the search and reveal.

Rather than making it unique to each user, I wanted to make an experience in which users must work together to reveal the mystery, and decided to make a treasure hunt.

I chose to start with putting a penny into a jar to signify the investment. The Makey Makey is attached to the penny and the tin foil that lines the jar. When the penny enters the jar, it triggers the next scene. In this scene, I video is projected onto a white box, and my voice (which has been slowed down) explains the next clue. They are to find the window and set it on top of the while box. The window has a strip of tin foil on the bottom, so when they set it on the box, it tin foil closes the circuit and triggers the next scene. (If you look at the image to the right, I have wires set up on either side of where they set the frame. These wires connect to the Makey Makey.)

In the next scene, the voice gives some vague directions that become more clear when the projection appears on the window. The users figure out that they need to link hands in order to close the Makey Makey circuit this time. This is the moment when the whole group needs to work together.

In this instance it would have been helpful to use something besides a penny, because the penny used in the first scene got mixed into the penny’s used in this scene.

Then, the next scene provides another riddle. It is pictured on the right.

They figured out that they needed to go back to the jar where they began. Taking the penny out of the jar triggered the next scene. I crossed my fingers that they would get the “Dig” message, but it wan’t clear enough. In hind sight, this scene might have had the voice tell them to keep digging. While we did it, however, I told them to think about the clue, and they figured out that they needed to go into the jar to find the treasure!

I definitely think that they expressed delight as they uncovered the treasure! Inside the jar, but obscured by the tin foil, I had hidden a bunch of chocolate coins.

To watch the experience, check out this video!

Final Project and Plan

11/13 – compiling the audio and projectors

light bulbs

audio/stereos

3 projectors

several objects, including smells

makey makey wired between them

isadora programmed for audio and visual trigger of each

Final Project Plan and Schedule

For the Final Project I will be creating a VR experience with three parts:

1. Intro to Firebird Cube

2. Interact with Firebird Cube

3. Environment Change with amount to interactivity with Firebird Cube

[The whole experience will be surrounded by the music of Stravinsky’s ballet Firebird.  The music will be from the following ballet and album

The recording will be the Carlo Maria Giulini recording with the Chicago Symphony recorded in 1979

My Plan and Schedule is as Follows:

PP3

Task: For our third pressure project, we were tasked with creating a mystery the did not use a keyboard and keypad.  I decided on a basic interactive 360 photo mystery. I found this task to be a good exploration of 360 photos and also the workings of 360 photos in the context of Google Maps and the ability to call images of public places from Google Pictures that are placed on Google maps.  I learned a bit about “text to speech” (as there is no dialogue, only auditory speech.)

Process: For this project, I started with a  map of California.  I wanted to take the user on a scavenger hunt up and down the coast with the “mystery” being a theft taking place at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  I also wanted the user to get a sense of the environment.

I started with drawing the cities, environments, suspects and the items that were to be used in discovering the thief.  I wanted to scavenge to take the user to cities and landmarks in CA.

Once I had the ideas written out, I found the images of the environments I was going to use.  The environments helped to dictate the pictures of individuals that were to be used and represented.  After I had all the images together, I wrote some dialogue for the suspects.  Once I had all the elements, I brought them into unity and linked them up using some basic scripting and a 360 template.

Feedback: I believe that my project was well received.  Due to the fact that only one person could go at a time,  there were only two classmates that were able to try the experience. However, they really seemed to enjoy the project and kept giving me the note that they had felt like they had been transported to another place.  This was my intention, so I was very pleased with that response.   I also asked for some feedback on the “voice to text” and the users seemed to love it.  This may be something I include in my thesis moving forward.  Text bubbles seem to disrupt the FLOW of the experience.

If I did it over again, I would have changed the photos to basic models.  I could have just used a simple command to then make their face (the photo) appear.  I believe this would be interesting as we have to decide to look at a person’s face in a public area and could have created some intrigue within the scene itself.

Schematic and Schedule

Pressure Project 2

PP2 was to create an interactive fortune teller in 9 hours. Similar to last time I challenged myself to completely begin and end the the process within that nine hour limit (this includes the brainstorming phase). Unlike the first pressure project, I went a route I assumed would be a(n attainable) challenge but instead realized the error of this assumption.

My original idea was to use a program called Max- a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling ’74. The program is similar to Isadora, but I was more familiar with how to use it and various sensors. I wanted to try to create a “fortune teller” that could use some sort of sensor to tell your fortune.

When I had spent too much time trying to figure out Max, I decided to turn to the Arduino, which I was familiar with and thought could work to create a physical fortune teller machine, similar to the 20 questions little game I had as a child.  I also knew that Arduino’s have tons of tutorials and help guides that might be able to assist in case I got stuck. It also helped that I had all the equipment from a previous class to get started (working by the light of a laptop):

My plan seemed straightforward: use an lcd screen to display questions to a user. Two small buttons would correspond to Yes and No answers to these questions.  The order in which a user answers would after a few questions generate a custom fortune. I began by wiring my arduino and led screen, using using a helpful code and preset sketch. This part was a success!

Next, I attempted to modify a few codes online, one being a simple fortune teller and the other being a code that have various forms of  “if this order of yes and no answers (ex: yes no no no yes) then do this (in my case read fortune).

This is where I ran into issues. When I put in a code, Text no longer showed up on the screen and my led stopped turning on. Then, my led light stopped completely. Then when I tried to get the box made so it would be held in something nice, I dropped the Arduino and messed up where the wired had been.

Then I ran out of time.

Pressure Project 3

Our third pressure project included these guidelines:

-Create a 3 minute experience

-user must touch something apart from the keyboard and receive a response

-Must include sound

-User must move in a large environment and a hidden mystery must be revealed

Though I tried to meet all guidelines, I based my experience off of the guidelines “user must touch something apart from the keyboard and receive a response” and “User must move in a large environment”. I wanted to encourage a physicality and adrenaline in the user experience. Inspired by simple video games, I created a game in which the user walked on a path made of aluminum foil and attempted to tag bananas to earn points.

The objectives of the game were as follows: Keep contact with the path, touch all bananas, beat the clock! Level 2 included the user performing these tasks backwards.

I intentionally placed the bananas far from the designated path so the user would have to stretch and reach to earn the points. Additionally, I included an element of time so that the user would have a sense of urgency in his or her movement. I was very curious about the human embodiment of a game that was inspired by a 2-D experience I played as a child.

As a whole, the experience was a fun time for everyone involved. I enjoyed watching the users try and beat the tasks and I think the users had a fun time playing the ridiculous game. My colleagues explained that this experience felt most like a game and that they felt a strong urgency to win.

Though it was a fun time for everyone involved, difficulties definitely arose in the system set-up(see video footage below). The path kept detaching from the floor and caused users to have to start over for no reason. Looking back on it, I should have taped the path to the floor so it wouldn’t move around as much. I practiced the game on carpet and didn’t take in to account the environment in which we would be playing it.

I really enjoyed this project and it definitely inspired certain elements of my final project game I am constructing!

PP3 Isadora Recording

PP3

Pressure Project 2

For my pressure project, I chose to make a simple webpage that would give you a new fortune every time you clicked on a fortune cookie emoji.

Link

I chose to do it like this because I wanted more experience with the particular web framework I used, and I wanted to make an interesting web experience in general.

Overall, I think I didn’t scope enough out for this project; I wish I had done more than what the final project ultimately ended up being but problems with getting a webpage up and running in the first place was an impediment in my project. I did have a lot of fun writing some of the fortunes though. There is a total of 81 unique fortunes that can be viewed, some I got from sites, others I changed a bit to fit the tone of the project more, and others I wrote from scratch. Given more time, I would have liked to include inputs from the user other than clicking such as giving fortunes to fit a name or picking from several fortune cookies on the screen.

If you’d like to read the fortunes in the project as a list, check out my github. The generation of the fortunes is in db/seeds.rb.

Pressure Project #2

For Pressure Project #2 we were assigned to create an automated fortune-telling machine utilizing any medium we felt comfortable with. I, still in the learning stages of Isadora, decided to use this platform to explore and develop. I had many goals for this project in order to challenge myself intellectually and artistically. My main goal of the project was not just to create t a functioning and responding system, but rather, a complex sensory experience that created a deliberate atmosphere. Naturally, I went with a 50s-esk carnival theme. I portrayed this theme through old film clips of San Francisco and a creepy sound scape that played throughout the user experience. My colleagues commented that they enjoyed these features of the system because it enhanced the mood of the experience and created a curious atmosphere. 

 I also wanted the computer fortune-teller to be tricky, clever, and mysterious. I tried to create a character within the system for the user to engage with. I did this by providing ambiguous instructions that could be interpreted many ways. I was curious to see if the user would be able to solve the riddles presented to them in order to receive their fortune. I also threw in some patterns that I hoped the user would eventually catch on to. My last goal was to utilize a wide range of triggers to keep the system moving forward. I used mouse watcher triggers, keyboard triggers, and voice and motion triggers intermittently throughout the system. The vocal triggers were the hardest to manage because every person has a clap or a snap of a different volume level. With this in mind, I made a pretty large inside range to catch a sound trigger. However, this caused my computer to sometimes pick up sounds that were unintentional. Or an intentional sound still didn’t fit within the inside range I allocated. This is still an area I need a lot of work in!

Every person who tried the system had a different experience. Some users immediately caught on to the patterns and loose instructions and others took longer to recognize that they were in a loop before they were able to get themselves to the next phase of the system. It was also interesting to use the devise in a group setting. When the people watching figured out the tricks of the system they experienced the uneasy feeling of keeping a secret to not ruin it for the user or future users. This uneasiness added to the overall mood of the system. 

I really enjoyed this pressure project and am looking forward to how I can expand some of these goals in to my future work in the class and beyond!

https://vimeo.com/293466317