Cabinet Project: Elysium in a Box
Magical places don’t stay magical forever. Don’t look under the bed. You have been warned.
In Elysium in a Box you can take a peek underneath a bed and see a magical world made of pure dreams. However, don’t stay too long there or your dreams will become nightmares.
You peek under a bed…
Photo by Julian Bleeker
This is what you see through a hole
Press a button and your dreams become nightmares
Here is how it works:
A sheet of plexiglass reflects a laptop screen ala Pepper’s Ghost. Behind the plexiglass are real elements that the scene is projected onto, creating a creepy ghost like effect. All this is enclosed in a casing with a peephole cut out for the viewer to look through. A flash app on the PC runs the video that switches at the press of a button. The videos are synched to switch at the exact animation time in the loop. Here is the flash program that runs in the box. Press and hold left mouse button to change.
Process:
I have been obsessed with illusions and magic from an early age. In the 8th grade I read the biography of Robert Houdin, a famous French magician of the 19th century. He was trained by a watchmaker and used a lot of machines and mechanical elements in his illusions. Alice in Wonderland always serves as an inspiration, and I wanted to play with the “through the rabbit hole” feeling the book portrays. Also, Disneyland uses many illusions like this in the line cues of rides. I wanted to see if I could make one myself.
For the theme I decided to use Goodnight Elysium (a game the GD3 team and I have been working on for over a year). I felt the game assets would work well with the dual reality theme I wanted to play around with. So, I started with the in-game assets but, had to clean them up a bit, make them higher poly, animate the cycles I needed, and render them out. I feel I should thank the Goodnight Elysium art team for their hard work on the original assets, without this project would not be possible in a week. So a very special thanks to Brad Newman, Kenneth Leung, and Mike Rossmassler.
I settled on a plan on Sunday while driving home from Northern California. I knew I was not going to have much time to put this project together due to my mom in the ICU, so I was thinking of doing something very simple. Something like a thousand bouncing superballs falling out once you opened the cabinet followed by a hand broom and a dust pan. On the ride home from the hospital I thought about projections and smoke and other things I really wanted to play with. I was going to be an intense two days but, I decided to take the plunge on the more complicated project. Creation commenced on Monday.
Prototyping:
The box went through many iterations. I was always trying to make the box smaller and smaller. Before any content was created or any nail was hammered, I had to make sure the illusion would work. I did this by ripping up a glass panel off my living room coffee table. My roommates were less then thrilled by this. I was trying to reflect a still image off my computer onto the glass in front of a black piece of cardboard with a picture of a tree. The pane of glass was fragile an heavy but, by tilting it up and down it was apparent the idea was sound and it would work. I swapped the pane of glass with a cheaper lighter piece of plexiglass, and placed the glass back on the coffee table, that made my roommates happy.
At first I was laying my laptop upside down projecting onto the angled glass. I was designing the piece to be seen from straight on. I hated laying down my laptop this way and knew it was an accident waiting to happen. I also scratched my screen a little by doing this. Eventually I figured out I could put my screen right side up with the viewer looking to the right of the setup and get the same effect. Another challenge was how to keep the plexiglass stable at an angle. I tried many things; bricks, wood ledges, and divits, before I came to the design I used which essentially was a weighted stand with a sponge nailed to the top to absorb the weight of the glass.
Reflections:
Overall I think the project worked out as expected. I had wasted a little time with constantly redesigning the structure, but I think I had to get to the conclusion I came to. I also wasted time spray painting the enclosure, when I ended up covering it with a blanket to make the bed anyway. If I would have thought through the bed idea through more I would not have needed to paint it. If I had more time I would have loved to make the enclosure box smaller. Also, I would like to have a nifty stylized button to press instead of a mouse. Or maybe no button at all, but a sensor that would switch the assets to nightmare after you had been peeking through the hole for awhile…. Creepy
