Cycle 2: Up in Flames
Posted: April 15, 2025 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For this project, I wanted to keep stepping up the interactivity and visual polish. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get all the way with either, but my aim was to continue to step up those two aspects. In these cycles, my overall aim isn’t to create one, final project, but to use them as opportunities to continue to play and create as much as I can before the semester ends, and I have to return all the toys to the Lab. I didn’t do a great job of keeping track of how I was spending time on this project. I spent less time than I have in the past looking for assets, partially because I’m learning how to use my resources better and more quickly. I found the music I used more quickly than I expected, which also cut down on this aspect significantly. I spent most of my time increasing my understanding of actors I’d used before and trying to use them in new ways. Once I’d locked in the main visual, I figured out what to add to increase the interest and then invested some time in designing the iterations of the “embers.”
Exploding Embers
I explored the Luminance Key, Calc Brightness, Inside Range, and Sequential Triggers actors, mostly, seeing what I could figure out with them. I used them in the last cycle, but I wanted to see if I could use them in a different way that would require less precision from the depth sensor, which was also at play in this project. In the last cycle, I struggled with the depth sensor not being robust enough to tune into the very exact way I wanted to use it; this time, I figured I would use it more to capture motion than precision. I still have to use TouchDesigner to get the sensor to work with Isadora. Because it’s free, I can see myself continuing to explore TouchDesigner after this class to see if I can at least replicate the kinds of things I’ve been exploring in these cycles. For the purposes of class, though, I’m trying to fit as much Isadora in as I can before I have to give the fob back!
Actor Setup
I think the main challenge continues to be that I want the sensor to be more robust than it is. I think, in many ways, I’m running into hardware issues all around. My computer struggles to keep up with the things I’m creating. But I am working with my resources to create meaningful experiences as best I can.
With this project, I wanted to add enough to it that it wasn’t immediately discernable exactly how everything was working. In that, I feel I succeeded. While it was eventually all discovered, it did take a few rounds of the song that was playing, and, even then, there were some uncertainties. Sound continues to be a bit of an afterthought for me and is something I want to more consciously tie into my last cycle, if I can leave myself enough time to do so. The thing I didn’t include that I had an impulse toward was to connect the sound to the sensor, once I actually added it. This was an option that was pointed out during the presentation, so it seems that that was definitely an opportunity for enhancement. I also think there was a desire to be able to control more of the experience in some way, to be able to affect it more. I think this would have been somewhat mitigated if it was, indeed, tied to the music in some way.
The presentation itself did immediately inspire movement and interaction, which was my main hope for it. While I did set up that getting close to it would be better, I also think that the class felt driven to do that somewhat on their own. I think choice of color, music, and movement helped a lot with that. The class was able to pick up on the fire aspect of it, as well as the fact that some part of it was reacting to their movement. They also were able to pick up on the fact that the dots were changing size beyond the pulsing they do when in stasis. I think the one aspect that wasn’t brought up or mentioned was that the intensity of the dots was also tied into the sensor. It was brighter when left alone to draw people to it and got less intense when things were closer to the sensor. A kind of inverse relationship. In some ways, the reverse would have encouraged interaction, but I was also interested in how people might be drawn to come interact with this if it weren’t in a presentation and landed on this solution.
If I were to take this further, I definitely like the idea of tying the embers to different pieces of the sound/song. There was also an interest in increasing the scale of the presentation, which would also be something to explore. I think my resources limit my ability to do the sound aspect, at least, but it would be the step I would take if I were going to go further with this, somehow. I also liked the idea of different scenes, and it is definitely something I was thinking about and would have been interested in adding with more time. I can absolutely see this as a thirty-minute, rotating scene interactive thing. I think the final note was that the boxes around the exploding embers could be smoothed out. It’s an issue I’ve run into with other projects and something I would definitely like to address in future projects.
Video of Stage
Song Used for Presentation