Pressure Project 2 (A Walk in the Woods)

I wanted to get away from the keyboard for this assignment, and make something that asked people to move and make noise. I considered making some sort of mock fight what got people to dodge or gesture to certain sides of their body, but I didn’t want to make anything violent. Serendipitously, I was an outdoor gathering while I pondered what to make, and this party what highly attended by bees. So, it began–a walk in the woods. I thought I would tell people that things (like bees) were coming at then and ask them from a certain angle and then ask them to either dodge or gesture it away. I thought I would use the crop actor to crop portions of what my camera was seeing, and read where the movement was to trigger the next scene.

Less serendipitously (in some ways) I was at this party because my partner’s sister’s wedding the was the day before, and I was in the wedding party. This meant that I had 2 travel days, a rehearsal dinner, an entire day of getting ready for a wedding (who knew it could take so long?), and the day after party. WHEN WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO MY WORK?!

So, to simplify, I decided to not worry about cropping, and to trigger through movement, lack of movement, sound, or lack of sound. Then, the fun began! Making it work.

I decided to start with a training that would give the user hints/instructions/practice for how to continue. This also give me a chance to figure out the patches without worrying about the content of the story. Using Text Draw, I instructed the user to stand up, and told them that they would practice a few things. Then, more words came in to tell the user to run. I created a user actor that would delay text, because I planned to use this in multiple scenes. The user actor has an enter scene trigger to a trigger delay to a toggle actor that toggles the projector’s activity between on and off. Since I set the projector to initialize “off” and the Enter Scene Trigger only sends one trigger, the Projector’s activity toggles from “off” to “on.” Then, I connected user input actors to “text” in the Text Draw and “delay” in the Trigger Delay Actor. This allows me to change the text and the amount of time before it appears every time I use this user actor.

I also made user actors that trigger with sounds and with movement. I’ll walk through each of these below.

Any story that prompted them to run or stay still used a user actor that I called, “Difference Jump++.” Here, I used the Difference Actor to and the Calc Brightness actor to measure how much movement takes place. (Note: the light in the space really mattered, and this may have been part of what made this not function as planned. However, because this was in a user actor, I could go into the space before showing it and change the the values in the Inside Range actor and it would change these values in EVERY SCENE! I was pretty proud of this, but it still wasn’t working quite right when I showed it.)

I used to gate actor, because I wanted to use movement to trigger this scene, but the scene starts by asking the user to stand up, so I didn’t want movement to trigger the Jump++ actor until they were set up. So, I set this up similar to the Text Delay User Actor, and used the Gate Actor to block the connection between Calc brightness and Inside Range until 17 seconds into the scene. (17 second was too long, and something on the screen that showed a countdown would have helped the user know what was going on.)

So, with this, the first scene was built (showing the dancer that their running action can trigger changes. The next scene trained the user that their voice can also trigger changes. For this, I built a user actor that I called, “Sound Jump++.” This functions pretty similarly to the Difference Jump++ User Actor.

So, the trigger for most of the scenes is usually either movement, stillness, sound, or silence. I’ve explained how movement and sound trigger the next scene, but stillness and silence are the absence of movement and sound. So, in add
ition to including a Difference Jump++ User Actor and/or a Sound Jump++ User Actor I had and Enter Scene Trigger to a Trigger Delay to a Jump ++ Actor. If the user had not triggered a scene change by the time the Trigger Delay triggered the next scene, it was assumed that the user had chosen stillness and/or silence.

Then, which scene we jumped to depended on how the scene change was triggered.

Next, I came up with a story line involving bears, bees, robots, mythical creatures, airlift rescues, search and rescue units, and I downloaded videos and sounds to represent these events. Unfortunately, I either had things jumping to the wrong scenes, or Inside Range values were set incorrectly, because the performance of this “choose your own adventure” story didn’t function, and we kept getting the same storyline when we tried it in class. I learned a lot in the process of building this though!