Thesis - Presentation
ITP Thesis Week Page - My ITP Thesis Week project introduction and description page for Frosty Goes to Hell.
Frosty Goes to Hell - ITP Thesis Week Presentation from James McMahon on Vimeo.
Streaming video footage from my Thesis presentation during ITP's Thesis Week, which brought together students, faculty, guests and live online viewers to watch Interactive Telecommunications Program graduating students present their Thesis projects. I explain my involvement and objectives for my project, and touch upon technological issues in relation to it. The presentation includes a Q&A session. ITP, NYU, 2008.
Frosty Goes to Hell - Physical Setup Demo from James McMahon on Vimeo.
Video of a couple classmates trying out my prototype for the Frosty Goes to Hell virtual-reality simulation experiment. As I still couldn't get relative position and orientation data I had to settle for a simulation video, though it was interesting to note the extent of disorientation and sense of fate and consequence with the character. I was in the background behind the camera for all this, mimicking their movements to give them the illusion of cause from their end and studying their reactions and motion
Frosty Goes to Hell - Wiimote Control Demo from James McMahon on Vimeo.
Video of me controlling Frosty after I was able to get the controls mapped to the wii-mote. Was able to completely control character using nothing but twisting the wii-mote so that it could measure acceleration. Still can't get relative position and orientation to work.
Spring Show, May 2008
Some photos below:
Spring Show 1
Spring Show 2
Spring Show 3
After Thesis was completed, we had a small amount of time to polish whatever we could in time to display our best efforts at ITP's Spring Show. I had many issues with trying to convert my game from being a playable concept on the PC to being a working installation game.
I installed Parallels on my MacBook Pro as well as WindowsXP so I could be able to run Virtools, which is PC only. Unfortunately, after a long series of frustrating setbacks, I hit the road block of being unable to run the physics package of Virtools, which costs extra (alot extra) besides my student copy of Virtools. This is essential for the game to even start, as everything is contained within a world controlled by physics behaviors.
Also, I wished to use the MacBook for its portability, especially since considering the circumstances, I wasn't sure if I was going to get the equipment I requested at the show, so I wanted to be able to carry my project independently without having to rely on one fixed place or room. Ideally, I wanted the wii-mote to be sensed by the Mac using DarwiinRemote and the virtools building blocks, but with no physics, nothing else worked, though Mac was reading and interpreting the data correctly.
To solve my basic problem of "how can I get this to where people can play it?," I mapped the controls to the keyboard, saved out an external version of the game that could be replayed on my desktop, and saved it from the PC and transferred it to the Mac so the physics were intact, though I wasn't able to get the wii-mote working with that external game version. I used USB Overdrive software to hook up a game controller and interpret the keyboard controls to the game controller.