The depressing, inevitable truth about life is that at some point people leave, no matter what you have to say about it, but this is our take on a silver lining so that everybody can find companions in their sadness.

http://samasrinivas.hosting.nyu.edu/category/food-have-feelings-too/

Description

This is an interactive storytelling piece that includes anthropomorphic food, food made out of clay, photo sensors linked to an Arduino and the p5.js editor. Users will have to interact with the clay food and the interaction triggered by Arduino and light sensors will activate pre-made animations made in After Effects.

This is for everyone who enjoys food, memes about grumpy old men, annoying teenagers, sad little boys and our visually appealing world and the characters we have created for it. Also, this is for those who can relate to the heart aching pain that comes when someone leaves or is taken out of one’s life, whether surprisingly or expected.

We also wanted to tell funny yet sad stories in a playful way using the skills we’ve learned so far. We wanted to say something about that inevitable truth, but do so in a playful and implicit way that seemingly skims over the true pain that it can cause an individual. We wanted to explore a new interaction with well-known and well-loved foods using the skills we have learned this semester.

We have three anthropomorphic food animated characters that we created for the interaction to compliment.

Storyline: Our three characters are a young, sad boy, a hormonal and annoying teenage girl, and a grumpy, old man. Using these archetypes of people in society, we are going to make scenarios using animation to create the reactions of these characters as the ones they like and love leave or are taken away.

Roger (Doughnut): A grumpy, old man whose super bitter about everything and is very mad at humans picking up his family and brothers in arms because it reminds him of his impending doom.

Raechel (Pizza): An annoying teenager who wants to do nothing but talk about her boyfriends and acts like she doesn’t care if you take her boyfriends away. But now, she has to deal with the harsh reality of life and loneliness.

Ronnie (Dumpling): A sad, lonely boy who has encountered too much loss in his life when it comes to his friends leaving. He has become jaded and thinks that inevitably everybody will leave him.

So how the interaction should work is the user should be prompted by a sign that says something along the lines of “Pick up the food one at a time”. The user can start at any prototype and put on the headphones. It will be pretty self explanatory from there. The user one by one will watch all of the animations and move on to the next prototype if they wish. Hopefully, nothing is broken after the user is done. There is a failsafe in the code to not mess up the interaction if two foods are picked up at the same time.

Pick up a food to try it out! Be warned, they are NOT edible!!

Classes

Creative Computing