Week 2 & Week 3 – Interactivity and related technologies

Interactive narrative is an ambitious art from existing today which combines traditional narrative (story-telling) with visual art and interactivity. It is a narrative form that allows player to affect, choose or change the plot and interact with the story in game. (from Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative)

We would like players experience more new forms of interactivity while playing game. Instead of playing by using keyboard/mouse, gamepad or joy stick, I think player can control and interact with the game by using their actual body (gesture, movement, voice etc.) directly or interact with actual object to interrupt the game world, their involvement will highly increased.  This game interface is called Natural User Interface.

Because I am mainly responsible to do game programming and interactive controls, therefore I have been researching and design any possible NUI controls for gameplay.

1) Kinect – Interact with an application using matural gestures without any input devices. Consist depth, RGB and body skeleton. (Kinect SDK)

2) Leap Motion – allows detection of hand and finger motions(LeapmotionP5)

3) Speech recognition – Speaker dependent / Speaker independent

4) Hardware hacking – Makey Makey / Kulezhai / Arduino with different sensors (e.g. vibration)

Arduino Project – interact with Piezo pressure sensor 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7o1UJerCRg

WEEK 1 – Final Year Project – Research (I)

We would like to produce an interactive game installation which is highly interactive with people, time and space.

As I have played and researched some games related to personal struggles with obsessive–compulsive disorder,depression and other mental illness, they inspired me to develop a game installation which is contain reflection of personal inner/mental struggles.

Inspired game:

EVER ENDING NIGHTMARES                       Alice: The madness return

  

Inspired story theme from a poem:

“Colossus" by Sylvia Plath / 「巨神」 －雪維亞・普拉絲

In this poem, author tried to re-establish her ‘spiritual supper’ (her dead father). She mentioned about emotions and feelings of the hatred and love dependance of her father.

Base of this poem, we established a new storyline that talk about a girl who has mental illness after her father died. She hardly believe the fact and stuck in her imaginal world.

Therefore, we considered that mirror can be our main medium of the set up for our installation. As mirror can symbolise the meaning of ‘reflection of inner self’.

Multiple-endings: Player’s interactions and choices can lead to different endings. Whether the girl accept the fact or creating her own world with different status.

Research example:

1. The “Weave Mirror" Interactive mirror installation

This installation assembles 768 motorized and laminated C-shaped prints along the surface of a picture plane that texturally mimics a homespun basket, which is closer to what we like to do.

The artist has taken everyday items – including blocks of wood, steel poles,handheld fans and paper – and transformed them into interactive ‘mirrors.’

The moving sculptures were created by New York-based artist Daniel Rozin and each one is fitted with a camera that films people as they approach it.

This camera sends an image of whoever, or whatever, stands in front of the frame to a computer, which in turn moves the mirror’s individual parts to the appropriate angles and positions. 

2. The “Trash Mirror" Interactive mirror installations