Week 9 3/11 – 3/15
Programming
To do more experiments to expand the possibilities of the interactions between contents and audio, Annie used the tempo of the audio retrieved from Spotify API. The first demo is spawning objects based on the music tempo. She added a weather system in Unity to add to the mood. She put elements from designers into separate scenes, grouping as last week. Previously, all the elements were in 2D scenes, so Annie used lighting in 3D to interact with the audio to open another possibility.
Hardware and Illusions
This week, the large fresnel lens finally came in the mail! Angie was able to playtest with it and see how it compared to the smaller lens. The team found that the large fens, while the depth effect isn’t as good, has other great qualities. First, it creates a blurry, foggy effect on brightly lit areas when contrasted with darker ones. This would be something like a streetlight shining in the middle of the night sky. The lens creates a halo around the brighter parts of the scene and makes the entire scene look dreamy. Second, the distortion is reduced from further away and extreme angles, allowing the guest more flexibility in how they want to look out at the window, which makes it a more comfortable experience.
We also created mockups of what our window would look like.
Here’s what the box that we would lean against the wall would look like. In context, we created another mockup, with some more creativity in it:
With these mockups, we were asked to make a more detailed installation concept art, which we will be working on next week!
Art
This week, following the beacon we decided last week, each of our designer create some tretched contents with our chosen music. We took consideration of using tech to create variations based on certain aspect of the music.
Cassie has created 5 different content in a dark tone to amplify the sad emotion. She has tried both city and natural scenes because she thought these were the main two categories that people usually look at or like to watch when in a vehicle. She has tried different opacity for different layers to creat depth. Cassie has also work with Annie for creating the snow particle in one of the scenes.
Yawen has created 5 different pieces of content that applied different methods, such as illustration styles and AI generative art. Both she and the client were most satisfied with the snow mountain scene which used noise to add more texture to the scene. And it became the direction the team wanted to explore more.
Kira did 5 different content and the bus stop with the man waiting for the bus worked well. The instructor and the client liked the storytelling in the illustration and we would like to bring that scene into our final content.
Anna tried to add animation to the existing video. We felt this direction had some limitations causing us to have to shoot our own video. So we are not gonna move on this direction.
Video Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BGGvZIW15upWyTtentaz2all2cEMUBdk/view?usp=sharing
Conclusion
We are making progress with the programming, hardware, and art content. Through the weekly meeting with instructor Mo, we realized there might be some misunderstanding about the content exploration between us. But we think the exploration of different syles was all meaningful and helped us to explore more possibilities. We need to speed up.