Project 4 - Exhibition

Finished adding the final touches to our exhibition this morning and overall I am really happy with the way everything has turned out. Our stars are making some really amazing and beautiful music that instantly creates an atmosphere to the whole room, our video explains our device well and clearly and is very informative, everything just really ties in well. It has been designed as a walk around exhibition consisting of 2 parts, an introduction to the device with a poster and informational video, then leads into sketches and the device, the device creates an ambient soundtrack to the room with our star track  playing through the apparatus itself giving another depth to the exhibition.

Overall i think the lecturers were really impressed and i know that i am definitely pleased with the final outcome of the project. I cant wait till the exhibition is open to the public. I want to see how people react to our device and exhibition and see if it is worth taking the project further outside of uni.

Project 4 - Fabrication Process

Ryan and Jason have spent the past few days busting their asses trying to get our fabrication done in time to get some tests done before the critique this friday. The project itself is looking really good, they have pieced together the body of the observatory creating a full cylinder, added the top piece with the tilt platform attached with hinges, also mounted in speakers and created a mechanism to adjust the angle of the tilt.

Jared has finished the max patch and is now working on ways to create a nicer sound for the stars to make.

I have a chance to kick back a bit and start planning for the coming exhibition, I'm thinking possibly incorporating a mix of the old and the new into the exhibition as the apparatus itself incorporates both a victorian and very modern feel to the observatory. So we came up with the idea of creating sort of Da Vinci style sketches of some of the more technical parts of the apparatus to incorporate this into the style too.

Project 4 - CAD Design

For our group i was given the task of CAD designer as it gave me basic skills i could possibly use for 3D modelling, also i was the person in the group that had the best grip around the SolidWorks program we would be using in designing for the fabrication process. Our apparatus was going to take the shape of an observatory, fitting in the way that we were observing the stars but also relevant to the idea of astronomy in general.

I found designing the pieces to be quite easy as the majority of the shapes needed for our apparatus were fairly simple shapes like cylinders or domes etc. The part that took the longest was figuring out with the group what dimensions we wanted for the apparatus. The general opinion was that bigger was definitely going to be better in terms of appearance, I was just slightly worried about transporting the apparatus to each location because of this but i'm sure we will figure it out.

Jared has spent the week working out a max patch using the downloaded youtube video as footage, and was working on getting the stars to create sound.

Overall it has been a productive week.

Project 4 - Conceptual Statement

Jobs:

Me - CAD Design
Jason - Fabrication
Ryan - Fabrication
Jared - Programming

Our main idea for this project was to use the stars in the night sky captured over a large period of time. The stars would then be spend up considerably to show the movement of the stars of the night sky, thus revealing the rotation of the earth. Once this is achieved we will use the stars rotation to create a soundtrack by running the footage through a Max patch programmed to pick up the stars through the colour difference, the height of the stars in the night sky as they cross a certain point determines the pitch of the note that is played effectively creating music from the stars.

The main inspiration of this idea came from this video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdDbjFqbU74&feature=fvsr found on youtube that showed some photography done by a man that did a time lapse of the stars but made trails from them and created quite a cool piece of art. We added to this of course with our concept of a musical visualisation but also looked into the ideas behind what we were seeing in the footage. While watching the footage we realised that the main focus is the sky, but when you consider that the camera is left in one place all night to capture this footage the focus becomes about the rotation of the earth and the star trails just a pretty effect that happens because of this. We wanted the stars themselves to mean more in our visualisation so we made them a crucial part of the audio visualisation creating a soundtrack purely based on the stars movement.

We put a lot of thought into the design of our apparatus, not only the physical design process but also on the technical side of the build. Leaving a camera out in the night for 13 hours exposes the camera to a lot of complications, for example condensation, dew and lense fog so the device needed to be able to protect the camera from the elements for the duration of each shoot. We did a lot of research into the cause of condensation and the probability of lens fog in order to achieve a clean shoot, but when it came down to it we really relied on the weather in terms of a clear sky.

This idea basically was developed using Jared's skill with Max MSP but also with our interests of which music was one we could all strongly agree on. As far as the apparatus we settled on the shape of an observatory because it was both relevant to our concept but also because it solved a lot of our practical issues also.

Project 4 - Brief Outline

Basically for this project we have to create a device that captures the world in a way that is new and different, and create a visualisation from that data that is both a live output while the operation occurs, but also can be shown as a stand alone piece and still be quite strong.

The two key components of this project are the physical construction of the apparatus, and the visualisation of the data. These components need to be developed and worked on the most due to their importance to the project.

Ideas so far: View of the city from underwater, similar to Atlantis or Rapture.
                   View of the stars in the night sky.

Project 4 - Flâneur Apparatus

This is it! The Complete mash up of all our previous project into one super amazing awesome SUPER PROJECT, of which i have no idea what i we are going to do with at this current moment! YEA! (super excited though)..

Reflective Statement

In all honesty i didn't really enjoy this project as much as i thought, i found it quite challenging to come up with an idea to work with a program i had very little skill with and i found this really limited my choice of options. In the end yes my idea was simple but i chose a more practical approach at this point to be able to achieve something from this project rather than find myself at a loss with nothing to hand in and nothing much learnt from the outcome. At least with this idea i have learnt some of the basics of max programming and have found out that programming really isn't one of my strong points. I found myself fine with the robot project as the programming involved was fairly straight forward and more visual where with max i found myself lost at more than one point in the project and had to ask others for help. I found true value in the other people in this course and realized that i can more than often ask around the studio and find help from people with a number of things which i found useful  particularly in being able to learn things easier but also explore other peoples skills in terms of choosing groups for future projects.

The Assembly

I decided to make my wearable interface themed to the main characters costume effectively making the player more in sync with the game. For this i used a plain white dress shirt which i found at a cheap second hand store, and attached my key board hack onto the back shoulder of it. A cable then ran along the arm to attach the thumb ring tilt switch to the user and the button was attached to the chest. I tested the final product and it worked so i found myself  ready for the presentation in the morning.

The Max Patch

I did struggle a bit in this area, luckily I had a little bit of help from Lee along the way as he showed me some of the key functions that he used in his very similar program. I obviously changed a lot of the things he showed me after  roughly getting used to the program as well as splitting up the parts of my video I wanted to use. I used the end scenes and adjusted them to play messages at certain points in the film at which would would then make the max patch respond to these frames and allow a specific button to be pressed only  within a certain time frame. This created my ability to either allow the player to progress the narrative or to fail miserably and have to restart. The same programming was then applied to the second switch creating either the dying narrative or the surviving ending.

Construction Underway!

I started off with the construction of my keyboard hack by soldering 26 wires to my keyboard just so i had enough wires to play with in case anything went wrong along the way. I found this process to be quite tiresome as it did take a quite a considerable amount of time attaching the wires to the tiny parts of the keyboard hack, but once it was done i tidied it up a bit using a few chocolate blocks to seperate wires. Then came the annoying part. I then found the number value for each key press combination i could achieve from my keyboard and documented them onto a grid for when it came to attaching the buttons, as well as making key presses for the max patch.

Project 3 - Conceptual Statement

At last i have an idea! i have decided to make my interface an interactive game situation with the film in which the player ends up with 2 different endings to the film as a whole, i narrowed it down to just the final scene from the film which is a firefight so i decided to incorporate that into my design. My main idea was to place the viewer in the position of the main character, The Wolf. While playing the game the player would have to pass "tests" in order to progress the narrative of the story thus providing an instant sense of the player actually getting somewhere with their interaction, the player MUST pass the first test in order for any narrative too continue but the second test provides an option of 2 endings. Ending 1 : The player Shoots the Pig and regains their honour. Ending 2: The player fails to shoot in time therefore dies because of this. This can give the player their own choice as to the ending, depending on how they like the character and whether or not they would like to see him punished by the end of the film or to see him succeed and regain his honour. I will have two switches involved in this interface to avoid having a spaghetti of wires and over complicating things. The first switch will be a push button placed in the centre of the chest and the second being a tilt switch that is attached to a ring that will go around the players thumb. The tilt switch will be activated when the player pulls bag their wrist towards their body which is my way of representing recoil from the gun adding the shooting element into the interaction. I drew inspiration of this project from a game i remember playing in the special features menu of a harry potter DVD a while back. Basically in that game you had to escape from fleeing spiders by choosing a direction that the car would turn, creating a maze out of footage from the movie. At this stage it was getting close to hand in and i realised i needed to really get working so that i at least have something to hand in. I had developed the idea at first from being a bunch of buttons on a sort of control pad which would have 3 or 4 seperate push buttons that would be coloured differently, each button would have to be pushed when the corresponding button clour appeared on the screen, sort of  creating a guitar hero style feel to the game. I wanted a more relevant set of controls involved with my interface to give it more character and make it feel more immersive into the films content. This is when i decided to bring in the tilt switch ring and chest button, the tilt ring to create the recoil feel, and the chest button was my way of showing the option to kill someone, through placing the button near the heart showing the option to stop the targets heart from beating (with a bullet!) Thus extinguishing his life.