Maya Churi

These last two posts are very exciting, Maya. I am especially anxious to see (and touch!) the physical interface. I also find the animation very compelling and unlike any vectorized video I have seen before. Part of what interests me about the girl who picks the dandelion is that her movement is both natural and unnatural -- I'm guessing that the pacing of her actions is part of what we will control via the ring interface? The way it plays in your test, I want to suggest something like: it should either be very "realistic" or even *more* stylized, so that we are not tempted to compare it with naturalistic movement. But again, this impression may simply be an artifact of not being sure of the overall context. If we are controlling the interactions of different figures and inanimate objects, then this may be a non-issue.

In this test, the two objects -- the girl and the dandelion -- feel very separate and unrelated at first, and it is clear that they have a different ontological status, so that it is very powerful when the two of them interact in a direct way and it's clear the animation was created specifically for the dandelion, even though it is a completely different kind of object. What works for me in all of this is the defamiliarization of both the images and actions. We are, after all, supposed to be experiencing these encounters as if we were a tree, so it makes sense for things to look and feel very different from our usual mode of perception.