Week 8

Experience Design

During week 8 we explored how we could improve the journey of the exhibit by adding some communication between room 1 and room 2. We brainstormed ideas for the 1st room interactive projections to influence the 2nd room with the immersive projection mapping for a more fluent guest experience. We wanted to add some interactive elements in the second room as well to make the experience more exciting.

Some ideas we came up with -Sense the audience size and spew that many swallowed men from the Pac-Man that will continue running to the second room with immersive projections.
1. Influence the number of layers in the video artwork by the number of guests present in the space. This way the animations would have looked more intense with more people.
2. We worked with our client artist Renee Cox to develop concepts for building connections between her video artwork projected in the second room with these interactive elements.

Tech Research

We explored the possibilities of influencing the first room’s experience with that of the other room, we started research on how we could so it using technology.

PHYSICAL SENSOR
Our first consideration was using a physical sensor at the space between room 1 and 2 that would sense the number of the guests entering room 2 and influence the layers of the artwork projected on the walls of room 2. This would make the projections seem more intense when there were more guests and calm when there were only 1 or 2 guests.
Challenge–
– The guests will never realise that the projection is influenced by the number of guests if they have no new guests entering or existing ones exiting.
– It did not supplement aesthetically to the experience or add to the narrative.

NETWORKING 2 COMPUTERS
We will use 2 desktops to run the exhibit. One will be used in the first room to support 1 project and 2 Kinects and the other will be placed in room 2 to run 5 projectors.

We explored the idea of networking these two desktops. The desktop in room 1 could send feedback of the guest interaction to the second desktop to influence the projection mapping. If there were two guests interacting with the installation in room 1 then we could have 2 animated men running from the first room into the second room or influence the density of layers in the video projected in the second room.
Challenge-
– Considering that the exhibit will run for over 6 months with least tech support, if one desktop malfunctioned if would affect the other rooms interaction as well causing the entire exhibit to shut down.

We did not find any tech solution that we could add to make the experience of both rooms influence each other. We continued to explore more possibilities and robust solutions.

Animation

Room 1

We iterated the Pac-man animation and improved the physics of the arms to be smoother when Pac-man opens and closes.

Before –

After –

Room 2

We learned from our client the she will not be able to provide us with the open After Effects video files of her artwork which meant our team will now be creating the video animations from scratch along with projection mapping them. This led us to dedicate 2 artists entirely on animation and take away the scope from the new interaction feature we were ideating.

We continued to find efficient ways of creating the video animation and projection mapping. We decided to use After Effects for the animation and started research on using Unity vs TouchDesigner for mapping.

Some challenges to resolve were –
1. Bringing the craft of the original video in the ones we recreate in such short duration. So, we decided to simplify the animations and were given the freedom by our client to not replicate the original video. This gave the artist more freedom with time efficiency.
2. Rendering the large size videos would be troublesome on our systems. We reached out to the IT department and researched about outsourcing render farms or getting better GPU.

Now we diverted our maximum attention to the second animation and started conduction experiments to prove our pipeline.