Heather Rasley @ ITP

I went to DC for Thanksgiving and decided to program while I was at Reagan rather than drop $10 to get online (boooo).

For some reason “Happy vs. Sad” came to mind. I knew I wanted to practice OOP, but didn’t really know where I was going. I ended up making a silly little prog in the style that I seem to default to in Processing: circles in random-but-constrained colors with random-but-constrained alpha…

The reddish (”happy”) flower objects come up from the bottom and the blueish (”sad”) flower objects drop down from the top.

I’d like to make this into a screensaver, but the Processing forum only had a how-to for Windows. Lemme know if you know how to make one for Mac.

For my PhysComp/ICM final I’m working with Amanda on a project tentatively called Gelastic (meaning to induce giggles – hopefully).

Gelastic uses Reactivision and the Reactive fiducials to create an interactive comic-like environment for kids around age 7.

Code: Our code is written in Processing and is based on the TuioDemo. It also uses a number of external libraries, which are credited in the beginning of the sketch. You are more than welcome to use this code as a jumping off point for your own. Just please credit Heather Rasley and Amanda Syarfuan. And let us know what you do with it!

Physical setup: Gelastic has only a few simple components, which come together to do some pretty neat things. First, a clear surface mounted about a foot above a tabletop. It must be clear so the camera can “see” the fiducial marks. Below this, a firewire camera connected to a Mac G4 laptop, in our case. Probably the more ideal setup would be a MacMini, but those ain’t cheap. The G4 is connected to a projector, as well as a keyboard.

Game play: When a child (or adult) places a physical object that has been marked with a fiducial over the camera sensor, a corresponding image appears on the screen. The user can move the object anywhere within the playing environment and modify and add to the scene by placing more marked objects in the space.

Our environment begins as a grassy field, but with the addition of the night sky object and the jiggly star object,the daytime scene is transformed into an outerspace scene.

Through this process, kids and adults can explore scene-making and even storytelling in a physical environment that is a unique hybrid of regular 3-D gameplay (i.e. playing with wooden blocks) and 2-D image creation/viewing (drawing, watching cartoons).

Challenges:
-On the code side, it has been difficult to work within the constraints of the TuioDemo because all of the fiducials are recognized within a single class. Other events that require their own “void” can’t occur within the class. Therefore, most more advanced features, such as audio playback, can’t work within this system. There is likely a workaround for this, but I wasn’t able to figure it out. If you know of one, let me know!!

-On the physical side, image detection has been surprisingly difficult. Each new lighting situation presents a new set of problems because, unfortunately, we’ve been unable to calibrate our cameras. Sometimes the camera’s ability to “read” the markers is obscured by shadows. Sometimes by glare. The thick Plexiglass that we’re using might also contribute to this problem, since image detection is usually not a problem when we hold the fiducials up to the built-in iSight on my MacBook Pro.

I had a very limited role in the editing process. I knew that the other guys were a little better equipped to clean things up, and I definitely wanted Scott to do whatever he needed to so that his vision would come through. And it did. I’m incredibly proud of our final product…

Dr. Dongle

First, the lighting looks fabulous. Big props to Scott and Sean for that. Plus, I think that our many, many takes paid off. We actually kind of come off like real actors. Well, college-level improv ones, at least.

Speaking of improv, you may be interested to know that both of my monologues were completely improvised. We did about five takes of each and I did it a little differently each time. The guys definitely picked the best ones.

I’d really like to put together a blooper/out-takes vid for this and help even out the audio. There were some really funny moments during our day-long shoot, including about five minutes of footage of me saying, “I can’t! I can’t!” about the whole “Fortress Kennedy” thing (though then she was called “Tammy”).

For our physcomp final, Amanda and I will be collaborating on an interactive choose-your-own-adventure type of storytelling system.

For me, this project was inspired by a number of things. The first was this article on parallel universes. Another is my own curiosity about decision making and how small decisions can eventually have large, serious outcomes. And, lastly, choose-your-own adventure books.

The system would work as follows:

1) A program will ask you a question about the next available decision in the story. For example, “Do you want to climb the hill, swim in the ocean or lay on the beach?”

2) If you click on “swim in the ocean,” the screen will prompt you to perform an action in order to make that decision become part of the story. We haven’t decided whether our sensors will take input directly from the user or from objects that he she manipulates, so here there are two possibilities: a) The user has to perform some kind of action, i.e. “Move your arms in a swimming motion to go swimming,” or, b) The user has to move his or her character in an interactive tabletop environment that we’ve created, i.e., “Move [your playing piece] into the ocean to go swimming.”

3) The story will unfold on a screen in front of the user, in a frame-by-frame, comic-like format.

4) Along with your main story in the main view, you will also see other possible stories appear in smaller views, making you aware of how each of your decisions have affected the story that you’ve created as well as alternate-universe stories.

5) When the story is over, you will be able to print out your story and walk away with a comic-like strip that summarizes the actions that you performed and the story that you created.

Amanda would like to come up with other ways that we can make the environment and game more interactive, i.e. servos and sound. I will probably end up focusing on how to make the visual result interesting enough that you’d want to print it out and keep it.

We both would like to do some research on children’s stories so we can create a story that would be engaging for both adults and children. I just discovered today that the self-proclaimed inventor of choose-your-own-adventure has a blog, so maybe that would be a good source of inspiration. We might even contact him directly to talk about our project and see if he has any suggestions. Why not??

At this point, though, I’d like to focus more on how we’re going to make everything work rather than what the story will be. If we can perfect the system, we can make the story interesting later.

The group for this project consists of Scott, Dan, Sean and myself. Our movie doesn’t have an official name yet, so let’s just call it “Dr. Dongle’s Discovery.”

Last week, we came up with the general concept and a rough storyboard. On Friday we sat down and tried to nail down some details. Scott took on the task of writing a rough script for us to work off of, since it was fairly dialogue-heavy. On Saturday, we shot the whole thing in one go at a single location (Dan’s apartment), from about noon to 10 p.m. (with a dinner break).

The shoot went really well. We get along nicely as a group and were able to move quickly from one scene or angle to the next. Scott served as director and made a great leader and cameraman. Sean was an actor and cameraman when Scott was on screen. Dan and I had the most lines, so we mostly stuck to acting, though all members of the team informed all aspects of the shoot along the way.

Even the parts we hadn’t scripted came together quickly and easily, thanks mostly to (for lack of better words) the “vibe” we had going. In all, it was a great time and I think we came away with some good-looking footage that will hopefully be funny, too.

Next week is post-prod, which may quite possibly involve animated critters, a la Sean.