Random Thoughts of Interactive Experience Assignment I

I've spent a couple days thinking about how to use our ZML as a new media to create some new content. I realized the hard to create new content. Here is some crazy thoughts, most of them is not applicable for 2 weeks project though. But I'm exciting about them when they come through my mind.

In this sketch, I did a rough caculation for the screens we have in the ZML. My ambition is still doing a panorama scene:p. The idea A is a mirror world. Imagine the big screens in ZML are some kind of mirror which can reflect the creature not in the real world. Does it sounds interesting. We can create a human or a creatures illusion in three directions, see if we can feel the existance of it or him or her, whatever. As what I wrote, if we can track a real user in the ZML, we can cheat his or her feeling about him or herself. Seeing a vitual dynamic illusion will be very interesting.

Plan B is really too ambitious. I want to deliver future in this project. First of all, we open our eyes to 220 degree wide FOV environment. A near future street. Then we have this new product, Augmented Internet Surfer, which you can see space based blog everywhere. It origined from one of Scott's works, remember that virtual insects in the campus? I imagine in the near future, this kind of information media will be possible. In the sketch you can see price label, name card, accident report, news report, advertisement are all delivered through virtual world. I'm addicted to imagine a world nearly drowned by the information. No matter it is good or bad? I know we can't stop the steps to that direction. As a 60sec short senario, this DVD is a training session that teaches you how to use this surfer and how to deal with tons of information. Let us prepare for the future.

Plan C is totally inspired from game design. We have such a good media, why not apply the basic interactive elements onto it and see if it is really attractive. I'll talk about this one on the class, in short, it is a game letting people choose their taxi or avatar and race in the campus or Los Angeles. During the middle, they can change cars. We shoot real video of our students racing in the real world and let the audience choose from 12 screens. This game is design to let people participate and look around at the other players.
A lot of detailed design is on the sketch, I'll talk about them on the class.

Plan D is from the thoughts of how to take advantage of 12 screens. 12 is a good number for time. The simple example is a security camera browser. There are 2*12 hours a day. So we can compress and play every two hours on one screen in just one minute. You will easily find the sequence you need. And by choosing it, it divides 2 hours into 10 minutes. And then into 50 sec, so on and so forth. Because you are surrounded by this environment, you can find out the frame you need just in 5 min without watching the 24 hours foliage. Another idea similar is showing a panorama scene in 12 screens which have different time range. So we will see the two corners is night, the middle is noon. I think that will be fantasitc.

Plan E is a game design encourage people to cheat. Personally cheat is a good elements in the game history. I'll talk about it on the class.

CAVEUT, an easy CAVE solution

This Summer, I was doing intern at ICT. We used a game Mutater in Unreal Tounament 2004 called as CaveUT in one of our project. With simple setup, I can have Unreal Tournament running on a hemisphere screen with three projectors.

The CaveUT is a simple MOD which allows up to 32 rendering spectators, which means you can use as many projectors as you need to form a Cave. ZML has 14 screens which is really a good location to setup certain Cave. And by useing UnrealED, it's really simple to build a virtual world and put it into a Cave environment.

http://www.planetjeff.net/ut/CaveUT.html

If you guys want to try it in the ZML. Look around for a PDF of the documentation… there’s an installation section in there that will get your on your way. Download the mod from here:

http://www.planetjeff.net/ut/CaveUT2003.zip

My colleage John DeWeese at Institute for Creative Technologies did an optimization for the Mutator for UT2004. Download the UT2004 one from here:

http://www.ict.usc.edu/~deweese/CaveUT2004_update1/CaveUT.u

SASO Project at ICT

I'm working on building the environment for SASO project at ICT. It's a training program for US officers to learn how to communicate and deal with Iraqi civilians. Although we are using Unreal engine, there is no guns and actions in SASO at all. The only interaction is communication with your translaters, drivers, quad members and the civilians.

The goal for this training is to find a murderer who killed four US soldiers. However you can not rush into Iraqi civilian's residence without proven evidence. The secondary script is currently being edited.

Here is one of the scene I did a month ago.

Iraq Coffeeshop

Wacom's new Tablet

I saw and tried this new tablet on SIGGRAPH 2004. I tried to do a quick sketch, the experience is quite different from the normal tablet I used before.

The feeling of drawing is very real because the ink is coming out under the pen now. However, this also causes some trouble I haven't met before. My hand covers the interface and my painting. I have to raise my hand in order to see a overview and find the right button. What an ironic situation! I like it still though.

Here is the quick sketch I did in 5 min.