Marc Tuters

On Tuesday Nov 14th, Perry, Anthony, Mike B. and Marc met for first of a weekly set of meeting and discussed the Hunter/Gatherer project in detail (others having helped with this project include Brad and Paul).

Experience
Perry discussed his interest in working on making something compelling rather than just something technically challenging. There was discussion of how to make the game's content more artistic. Building on the animal metaphor the meeting started with the idea of trying to reproduce the perception of a mouse for example (creating poor vision)

The Gatherer

Working with visual AR HMD's
Mike expressed his interest in working on an AR game with HMD. he particularly liked the idea of looking up to see the bird attacking. We discussed the division's long-standing interest in this area (Perry, Scott and Mark in particular) and how a collaboration with Adrian's group would allow for us to potentially explore new ground here. Perry mentioned however, that the current nature of the game did not lend itself well to using AR HMDs. In other words, seeing the bird attacking would be very hard to pull off.

We discussed how another project would perhaps be better suited to working with an AR HMD such as a strolling game based on a highly rendered version of campus (here the notion of modeling USC as an Arcadian ruin was mentioned).

Marc expressed his concern in working with a dorky-looking HMD interface which was why he wanted to disguise the Gatherer's interface in a plush bunny costume. At this point an alternative notion of working with Julian's tablet PC was brought up. Used for VisaVie games, the tablet PC features 6 degrees of freedom tracker combined with GPS would be a less obnoxious interface.

Book interface:
Perry proposed an interface for the Gatherer in which s/he might walk around reading a book about the campus (with elabourate rendered images from the aforementioned Arcadian ruins of the campus). Wis both perry and then later with Julian Marc discussed using the tablet PC with the 6 degrees tracker to create an experience where the Gatherer would read a book when the tablet where facing down, and see a rendered co-registered world when he where holding it up (like a magic looking glass).

Using spatialized sound
Perry discussed how sound was hard for people to interpret without visual cues, and thus working with spatialized sound might pose a real challenge in terms of the Gatherer accurately positioning the Hunter.

The Hunter

Wind current effects.
Perry pointed out that Brad had noted that there was not enough of a challenge for the Hunter, so he suggested a version of the Hunter experience where the bird could be caught in wind currents, making it more difficult to find the Gatherer.

Flying interface
Kelly told me that Mark Bolas's thesis was about making a flying interface in VR, this could be useful.