Week 2: Jan 22, 2024 – Jan 26, 2024
- Meetings with John Choi and Shirley Yee
- Preparing for Quarters
- Refining experience narrative
- First client meeting
- Assigned roles and responsibilities
Week 2 was spent becoming more familiar with ARENA through tutorials with John Choi, learnt more about the stories and memories of Pittsburgh Chinatown’s from Shirley Yee and had our first meeting with our client, Anthony Rowe and other members from Wiselab. We also assigned more specific roles to each of us and refined our design goal and vision.
In terms of design goals, we were able to start refining our idea of what the experience could look like. We want to explore the question and make guests reflect on ‘what makes a great community?’ We will work on defining a target audience but right now we think this experience might resonate with immigrants and international students. A broad overview of the experience is
- The guest(s) scan a barcode and see a large vase/plate (some kind of pottery) with a tapestry painted on it.
- An accident happens and pottery shatters.
- Portals open, which the guests can see.
- They enter the portals and see a short story about a significant Chinatown location that was important to the community.
- Once the vignette is complete, they retrieve a piece of the pottery.
- Once they have all the pieces, they reassemble the pottery, which then displays a full scene of Pittsburgh’s Chinatown thriving in the 1910s and 20s before the Boulevard of the Allies divided it.
John Choi showed us the different workflows and pipelines involved to create a scene in ARENA. Shirley Yee shared a document with us written by her father about his memories of growing up in Pittsburgh’s Chinatown. Titled 1930s Third Avenue: On Leong and the QYT written by Yuen Yee, details the individuals, locations, relationships with the white community and impact Pittsburgh’s Chinatown has had on the development of the city. It will be an excellent resource as we flesh out the narratives in each of our vignettes.
We also reached out to Tom for advice in photogrammetry and the CMU student who worked on the paper model. Tom did not encourage us to photogrammetry for the exterior of Chinatown Inn because the result will not reach our expectation and will take a longer time. The paper model is not as ideal as well. The team decides to build our own model from scratch and use the smaller models provided from the Smithsonian museum.
After meeting with Shirley, we gained a deeper understanding of Chinatown history, and we brainstormed a storyline based on several highlights from her stories. To sum up our main walk through, we would like the players to enter the Chinatown Inn as a guest for food. As he or she dropped the plate to the ground and broke it into pieces, the player teleported to the past with the mission of collecting memories while fixing the plate.
We also created a responsibility chart, with a detailed breakdown showing who was responsible, consulted or informed with the different disciplines involved in this project.
Our plan for next week is to make the narrative clearer through storyboarding and create a gold spike prototype of our experience in time for quarters on Friday. On Monday 29 January, we are going for team bonding at the Chinatown Inn, which stands as a memorial for Chinatown. We will also take pictures of the local area to understand the space we are working in.