Last week, I had an entirely different idea for my physical computing final. The feedback from class is that in order to make it work, it needed to be a lot more interactive. I had been excited about it because it was really more art for the sake of art and trying to build something that was both beyond my current feedback and pointed for no other purpose than to create something beautiful. While the idea is still of great interest, it might not be interactive enough for this particular assignment, so I am going to go another direction.
Instead, what I’d like to do is try and combine my ICM final with my PComp final to create an interactive game experience that relies on both sensors and software programming, which means I will be working a lot with serial communication.
BACKGROUND
For my ICM midterm, I created an interactive video where the main character was trying to get from his home to the subway. When he would reach certain points in the journey, he would hold up two different colored balls. The video would then pause and the video camera on the user’s computer would turn on. The user would then have to hold up a ball corresponding to the direction that the character should move. If it was the wrong way, the character would get beat up and the game would reset.
I had a lot of fun with this project, and I would like to take it to the next level for my final. I actually think it’s a good fit for both classes because a story/game like this involves the user in a very interactive way. They are not just using a joystick or wiimote to navigate through the world that we create. Our goal is to make the player part of the story and equip them with the tools to win the game, which I’ll explain in more detail below.
RESEARCH
I’m going to work on this project with Winslow Porter from the afternoon class. The goal is to first come up with a compelling narrative and then determine the best ways to apply some of the different technical executions we have in a meaningful way.
There are a few examples of interactive games that struck us as fascinating in the way they took an existing technology and repurposed it in a new way:
In “A Car’s Life,” participants watch a brief video of a car meandering over some difficult terrain. At some point towards the end of the piece, a button appears for viewers to click. If you do so in time, you advance to the next level and watch the car overcome even more obstacles. If you don’t click the button in time, the car crashes and the video ends.
Hexolabs used YouTube’s annotation feature to insert links into each video connecting them to other YouTube videos they created for the various levels. In doing so, Hexolabs created what is probably the first interactive video game on the popular video sharing site.
Twix created what they call an “interactive love story, (sort of)” where the user watches a clip of a movie and then checks a box to determine which way the story goes next. Here’s a sample clip:
While both of these are innovative uses of video, we felt they could still be more interactive.
NEXT STEPS
There are a couple of things we need to do next. We first need to come up with the story that we want to tell, and then we need to determine what types of physical computing and processing codes we need to write in order for the user to make choices and progress through the game.
THE STORY
We came up with a storyline that we like, although it still needs a little more work to get it fleshed out. The premise is that you are a celebrity. The camera will act as the main character to make this feel as personal as possible. Your assistant comes to you with a valise that includes a number of items, including:
- cell phone
- subway card
- green apple
- sunglasses
- street map
THE SYSTEM
So once the story is ironed out, the next thing we have to do is shoot the video. There will be somewhere around 16 separate scenes that will need to be shot, edited, mixed with music and the fused together into one long .MOV file. The rest of the work (and the most challenging) will then be to determine the order in which movie is played, thus the “choose your own adventure” style.
This is decided by the various programming and physical computing processes we put into place. I am estimating there will be either five or six choices that will need to be made, thus giving us five or six places where we will need the user to choose between two options. Depending on their choice, the video will either continue or a final scene will play out indicating that the game has ended. We want to leverage the items in the valise to make the choices more interactive. Here are some of the options we’ve discussed so far:
- User takes a picture when s/he starts the game, which is then incorporated later in the story line;
- User is asked to send a text message to a specific number, which will auto-return instructions for making the next choice;
- User will have to choose between three options on a subway map, one of which will progress the story while the other two will result in game over sequences;
- User receives an email upon ending the game (contents TBD);
- Color tracking apple;
- Voice recognition (clap once to go left, twice to go right);
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