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The Inferno

with Eleanor, Scott, Matt and Griffin

A new 3D underworld where The Seven Deadly Sins meet their fates falling into firey pits of lava as players move the ever-changing terrain using a live camera feed.

Description:

In this new 3D Virtools environment, the camera defines the dark terrain of Hell (through texture displacement) with several "lava pits" opening to reveal bright molten lava. A parade of Animated Sprites, representing The Seven Deadly Sins, walks from one end of this long black corridor of trap doors to the other. The player controls the web camera fixed on a black camera terrain that contains light-colored objects. The light areas in the camera terrain create openings on the 3D terrain that are filled with a sea of molten lava. The user can move the openings to catch as many of the Sins as possible. Each time a Sin sinks below the lava surface, sounds are heard (of sins being cleansed, perhaps) and the player scores a point. This environment would be projected onto a concave sphere, allowing the user to immerse herself in a 180 degree experience. May contain trace amounts of contemporary socio-political commentary. Midieval guilt not included.

Interface: This project will be built with an interface made from a plastic dome, a web cam mounted below it and a monitor screen to the side. Users will put on white-fingertipped gloves. When they place their hands on the plastic dome, the camera below reads their fingers' positions and creates a depression in the 3D texture mesh. These depressions will look like molten lava pits in the 3D world. The 3D world is a simple environment of static terrain and moving openings of lava. The terrain is populated with several versions of auto-mobilized sprites. The sprites could be controlled by ambient sound in the room, but they would ambulate through the environment on predetermined paths (unknown to the user) and be dunked in lava by the user's strategic finger placement. Background: This is where we were at before we forged this into The Inferno Realm.

We discovered a simple terrain that could be changed on the fly using a sharply-contrasting area on a dark surface. This created what looked like an opening in the forest, a dead patch of grass or a light in the forest. We combined a pen-displaced mesh texture (the one that reacts to the mouse pointer.) This could be the start of a promising game that involves two people: creating the holes in the terrain, creating the mouse-displaced "uprisings" in the lower terrain, or walking the character through the terrain. A combination of these could now be explored.

Concept: Let's talk about it.