Time: 10/03-10/09

Outreach:

This week, we talked with Carl Rosendahl, Christian Barnes (’11), and Jesse Schell with the prototype of the show Carmilla. After these conversations, we started to realize the potential impact of our product on the overall theatre community. Bringing props and posters alive with WebAR could be applied to many theatres due to their lack of digitized content. When a show is not recorded during the performance, there isn’t a way to experience it again, but visitors can get a glimpse through a similar AR product. Similar to a museum mentality, visitors usually come to the archive in groups thus our product should also consider collective behavior and how to foster conversation among them.

Production:

The halves presentation is next Friday and we started to prepare the slides, although our focus has always been on prototyping more demos before halves. By the end of the week, three demos were ready, an AR video for La MaMa Collage, interactive stories for the sofa from Carmilla, and the poster of La Marie Vison. Demos are shown throughout the blog.

We will be referring to AR videos and interactive stories for the rest of the production. An AR video means when you scan a still picture, it will be replaced with an overlaying video relevant to the picture. For example, see the demo for La MaMa Collage. An interactive story is more complicated in a literal sense. Visitors should be able to learn about the story by interacting with AR elements. The experience around the sofa from Carmilla and the poster of La Marie Vison are both listed under interactive stories.

Design:

For all interactive stories, we designed a general intro where visitors scan the QR Code, read a digital playbill, and then interact with the items.

Based on the story of La Marie Vison by ​​Kenichiro Suzuki, we designed an interactive story around the butterfly motif from the show. The experience starts by showing an animation of a little boy catching butterflies and the visitor (you) is prompted to tap on the flying butterflies to collect four in the frame. Once the collection is complete, another animation sequence is shown – the little boy is captured behind the bars by his mother. The social, sexual, and political implications in the 1-hour show are difficult to be comprehensively shown in a short AR experience. In the end, we hope to highlight the core relationship between mother and son.

Art/UI:

The art style is inspired by the poster and Damian and Jingyuan recreated the butterflies based on the boy with wings. Yutian used the sprites to create animation in After Effects (refer to the demo below).

Programming:

Combining multiple animation sequences, tapping action, and UI, Bokang was able to create a demo within the latter half of the week. With early experiments of dragging action, dragging the butterflies into the poster frame didn’t work out well due to laggy feedback compared to tapping on the butterflies.

An AR video demo for La MaMa Collage was also ready by the end of the week.