Author: mvy211

Your Adventure in Sounds and Words (Turned Exploration into Reading) – Monika Yosifova- Rodolfo Cossovich

Conception and Design:

Since we had to use both Arduino and Processing, it felt as though for this Final Project, one must have a physical object with Arduino which would interact with something on a computer screen through Processing. Originally, I thought it shouldn’t be too difficult to create an object that people would want to come up to and play around with. The Adventure in Sound and Words that I designed alongside Alison Frank turned out to work as a concept, but the design was much more difficult to execute properly. We put the Arduino components inside of a wooden, laser-cut box which we then painted over in order to make it look more unique and interesting. A definite problem with the design was that we chose to use distance sensors in order to measure a user’s interaction with the Arduino. Distance sensors are extremely sensitive to movement, and if a user didn’t have a steady hand, the story which they were experiencing on the monitor would skip through slides. This was annoying, and perhaps we should’ve used buttons instead of the sensors. I didn’t want to; since some of the feedback I was given from my previous project was that I should’ve used sensors instead of buttons… It was one of those decisions where you had to pick one or the other, stick with it and hope for the best.
Probably the biggest design problem that we encountered, even bigger than the sensors, was the difficulty of writing text which people would spend their time reading as they interacted with the Arduino. As we tested people through our project after user-testing, we found that they didn’t read the full story on the screen, and instead just followed the instructions at the bottom. For a project that was originally meant to be an entertaining story-telling experience, this ruined it entirely. BUT, it was a very interesting discovery. Not all people actually enjoyed reading, and this meant that the product we were creating wasn’t for everyone.
When we realized this, my partner and I were completely blown away, and made a last-minute change to a Final Project Concept, adding in a sign made out of cardboard box which says “I didn’t read SO I DIED” to the project. It was a tribute to all of those times we didn’t fully read the Recitation Instructions in class or just skipped through the guiding instructions of our Tests. It was a little physical form of punishment which we wanted to give to those that didn’t value the story which they were reading. It was effective, because it let us explore our project in a very different direction.

Fabrication and Production:
One of the most significant steps in the production process of our project was originally the design of the box which we printed in order to cover the Arduino. We made a 39×29 cm box with a height of 8cm, which was lasercut and then put together with hot glue. We designed, with the help of the lab assistants, two 6×2.5 cm rectangular holes through which we stuck through our distance sensors. Everything underneath the box, aka the Arduino, sensors and cables, were stuck onto the bottom of the box with strong scotch tape, because paper tape was too weak to hold the breadboard and Arduino. Once this was created, Alison and I didn’t want to leave the wooded box bare, and spent a bit of time deciding what color and design to put upon it. Ultimately we chose a dark brown-black background color, as it was going to be placed on top of my laptop, and we wanted it to attempt to blend in, as if they were one structure. Then, because the background was too simple, I took the basic dragon design from the Dungeons and Dragons logo (a tabletop roleplaying game) and drew it onto the box in white. It was representative of the fact that Dungeons and Dragons partially inspired my production of Your Adventure in Sounds and Words. The laser-cut box was wonderful, very different from the two-minute makeshift cardboard box which Ali and I used for User-testing. That one was truly just a small cardboard box over which I color printed a Dungeons and Dragons print, stuck it with glue and cut out two small holes for our sensors. It was a prototype that did the job, but ultimately the final product box was much better.

Conclusions:
Your Story in Sound and Words was intended as a short single-player roleplaying videogame which anyone could just play when they wanted to escape everyday stress for five minutes of their day. Interaction for me was the ability for two actors to interact where one can take in information, process it and then output their own information. It worked to an extent, as people were capable of making choices in their in-game journey and therefore reaching different outputs of information as they went along in the short game. The game was interactive to an extent, but it wasn’t interactive to the level of being angle to properly and fully communicate with another person because all of the choices were pre-determined. Based on my definition of interaction, my audience interacted with my project in a decent way. Some users didn’t wish to read the information that was given to them on the screen, and therefore weren’t interacting with the story and the project as a whole how they were supposed to. This taught me that it is possible that what you create may not be universally as interesting for everyone. My product was for a niche of people who enjoyed reading, and those who didn’t would interact with the project in a way where their hand motions were much more valuable than the full input they received in return
I think this project shows an interesting split in society, between people who enjoy reading and those who don’t. It makes me curious as to what the actual societal percentages of these are, even though it is quite impossible to account for the full world’s opinion. It makes me wonder if those people who don’t like to read are those who are those that cannot afford to “escape” their everyday lives even for a little bit. No, that doesn’t seem correct. There is some very interesting correlation and deeper meaning between those people who consider reading an interaction of brain and book, and those who just skim-read in order to “get on” with things faster.

Thank you!

For the Workshops Recitation session I picked to do the Object Oriented programming with Tristan. I largely followed his guide for how to proceed with the exercise.

In the class we decided to treat words as objects, which we could program to have actions with around the screen and I really liked that idea. Words have power in my opinion, and if used properly in this case they can have a lot more meaning in a much simpler coding example. 

First, I set the terms, which helped a lot since I got to use the code that we created with Tristan in class:

By making the terms a String of words, it was easier to identify the factors which we wanted to interact with, such as the placement of the word upon the screen or the size of the word. 

Then I wanted to provide a cool meaning to the words I picked so I decided to create an Array list of word items  called “Problems” and then I proceeded to enter a bunch of problems that people deal with during their everyday lives.

Based on how I coded them, they appeared on different places over the screen :

Then I wanted to, as we were taught, remove the items from the screen after they were drawn. I coded in the keyPressed function. Once a key on my keyboard was pressed, one of the words from the screen would remove itself. And then the next, and then the next. And in the end you would be left with  a blank black screen with no problems. 

I wanted to show that in order to remove your problems, you only needed to start acting on them. “Starting” or “Beginning” is always said to be the most difficult step to take on a path. 

Thank you for reading!

In the Media Controller study recitation we were allowed to pick which images we wanted to use and figure out a way to manipulate them using Arduino.

1. I knew I wanted to use a fantasy city as a Background for the intended process and picked the image of  “Vasselheim” as drawn by Brandon Chang (image below).

What I wanted to do was cause a creature to appear in the city and use the controller to manipulate the correlating importance of the beautiful city compared to the beast attacking it. For the creature that I wanted to attack the city I dove into the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Monster’s Manual and decided on the “Bullete” (image below) 

I wanted to be able to shift the focus onto the Bullete by blurring out the background of Vasselheim, and the contrary, blur out the Bullete to put the focus on the Holy City of Vasselheim. To do this I knew I needed two controllers with link the blurring effect of either of the two images. 

I used my previous knowledge of Two-variable Arduino to Processing code to figure out how to plug in the resistors that I used as controllers and link them in with the Arduino which I then plugged into my laptop.

Coding the functioning Image on Processing was much more difficult than  coding the Arduino was, as I used newer knowledge. I started off by stating the Images that I wanted (Vasselheim and Bullete) as PImage and attaching them to the Processing file through dragging them. I then put loadImage for both of the images in void setup.

Then I moved into void draw, where I had to place the images based on the bakcgrounds’ height and width. I made the Bullete really small, smaller than the actual size it is supposed to be, but I wanted to highlight the actual beauty behind Vasselheim. 

Lastly, I moved on to void setupSerial, through which I connected the Arduino input to the Processing. 

This was the result: 

IMG_8071.TRIM

2.  I’m not certain if we’re talking about our Final Projects here? (I will assume so) Based on the article “Computer Vision for Artists and Designers,” It is difficult to relate my project to the article mostly because when I look at my project, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything new.  Our project isn’t as much “Interactive Art” as it is “Interactive Story”…but then, storytelling is art right? Our project does utilize vision, but it is vision with colors, where people see sentences pop up across the screen and the most important words in those sentences are highlighter, or underlined, to showcase importance.  Our project also uses touch/ closeness sensors rather than camera sensors.  The article and examples, were very interesting however! It makes sense why the Camera quality just overall jumped during the past decade and a half…I never though about it before. 

Step 1:
The three projects that I critiqued were extremely interesting! I got to sit down and talk with people I haven’t had the time to get to know very well yet, and found it super exciting to be able to discover how different everyone’s Final Project ideas were from my own.

The first project which I took a look at belonged to Serene Fan, a very sweet classmate of mine who actually has a rather similar inspiration to her project as my own! She is creating a car-driving simulation on her laptop and getting a real steering wheel for it to be able to work accurately. The key idea that she wants to explore is making driving fun for people. She plans to do this by showing off the importance behind choices- when the people playing her steering wheel video game, they will constantly be given the choices to either steer the car on the left or the right path ( with some of the paths taking people to pink worlds with rains of diamonds, for example). My biggest critique for it was time management, because she said she wanted to code the entire road as moving rather than use a still image, and depending on how long she wants to make the game, the amount of time she spends to code it could be very long…

The second project I took a look at was Daniel Zamiri’s. I was super excited to see what he had though of, since he is a friend of mine, and was extremely surprised when he took the route of “Trying to make people appreciate what they already have.” He wants to do so by measuring people’s heart rate and showing it up on a monitor. My issue with project was that it reminded me a little too much of a hospital, and just the flickering pulse on a screen didn’t exactly express the idea he wanted to convey. I really wasn’t certain how to help him. My suggestion was to perhaps add a very nice warm guitar strum tune once the heart rate starts showing on the screen, to symbolize that being alive is something special, and perhaps adding some positive encouraging words on the screen.

The last project I had the chance to look at belongs to a French gentleman called Tristan. I hadn’t had the chance to speak to him much before, but I liked his idea of creating a musical instrument which took away the difficulty barriers of having to take years to learn how to play it. I liked it a lot! He was having difficulties deciding which notes to permit the instrument to play (full notes or half notes) and I gave him the idea to maybe base the notes around a well-known theme, such as the Mario or Kirby theme songs, and actually give the players something to aim for when the play the instrument. Being able to hit all of the notes properly would make the players feel like they have achieved something!

I do not think we focused as much on the definition of interaction outside of actually reading it from the blog posts, but even in those, it wasn’t explored a lot…

Step 2:
I got a few different points brought up as feedback on my project.

1. “It’s going to take a lot of work to make a lot of endings.”  – I do agree with this. Making a lot of endings for a roleplay game would be difficult so I will have to be smart with the way I write the script. There are going to be a lot of answers which diverge slightly in paths, but end up leading to the same endings, in order to make the story easier to code, but also more interesting to play through.
2. “What is different from this game from what I can download on my Iphone”- I…hmmm, I mean, it’s on a computer. In all seriousness, I do not exactly know. It does have quite a few similarities to Iphone-related roleplay games with the sounds, words and sensory-based decision making…I never thought about it this way
3. “Is it based on choosing a character? Do we have to create one?” We never really intended for there to be character customization. There is no gender or name given to the character a player plays, they are just supposed to be themselves, escaping from reality and existing in this other world.
4. “Maybe it would function easier with buttons” I did buttons for my Midterm project and was told to perhaps explore sensors, so I wanted to try something new. 

I feel like there is a lot of dimensions in which the project could progress, and that both excites and bothers me. The idea of making this project something new, which hasn’t been experienced before gnaws at me, and I wish I knew how I could achieve that. The feedback I received was more curious technical questions than actual feedback, despite this, it showed me how people were thinking, and how players would react to the game in itself. 

I believe that I actually need to properly finish writing the script and then beginning to do the coding, to be actually able to fully see and decide how to incorporate the feedback I received from my classmates. I’m really excited for user testing, not just for my project, but for theirs too!

Interaction to me, after becoming a student of Interaction Lab, has become the action or ability of one actor to be able to attain a reaction from another. The actor does not necessarily have to be human or animal, however those do obtain the highest level of a reaction in my opinion. Living creatures, such as Dogs, Cats and People, are raised with the ability to think, form opinions and act as they please; this means that they can interact with whatever they wish to of their own will. I believe sensor based objects such as horror house traps or video games can also be interactive, but they are interactive without being able to have an opinion of their own. Crawford’s article on “Interactive Art” is definitely a piece of work that helped me better understand the concept of what is truly interactive. It broadened my understanding of the meaning of the word “Interactivity” and I do agree that in order for something to be interactive to a high degree, it needs to be able to Listen (Comprehend), Think (Contemplate) and Respond to another actor.

What I would like to do for my final project is a video game of sorts. Originally I was inspired for it by Dungeons and Dragons- a fantasy tabletop role-play franchise where friends would gather around a table and be able to interact with a story, changing it and molding it as they go through it into their own adventure and legend. I was inspired by how every person who I played Dungeons and Dragons with was important individually and immediately fell in love with the characters that they created for themselves. I, for example, was Kharis Galafion, the Forest-loving elf…who also worshipped a god called the Blood Lord, but don’t worry! He is a relatively Chaotic Good deity!

I also received a recommendation by my professor to look at the Bandersnatch, a Netflix episode of Black Mirror, as I researched further on how to progress the project and shape it more into something interesting but also different. Black Mirror, similiarly to Dungeons and Dragons, highly values the decisions which the people watching the show make, and chose a path for a character based on their choices. The Concept of the Bandersnatch is that the Stefan Butler, the main character, is creating a choose your own adventure fantasy book into a video game, which is very similar to what I want to do! The entire idea with that particular Black Mirror Episode, however, is that Butler is making a game that gives the player multiple choices but the further he gets in completing the game, the more his own life begins to replicate it….which is kind of creepy.

The case is, for me, that I am also a creative writing minor and am working on a long term project. I though it would easiest to adapt some of the scenes from inside this project into this video game that my group-mate and I are going to try and develop. We have started writing the script, which I consider exciting! My biggest issue is that the project will probably only be able to fit one player, and if it only fits one player, I do not think it should be too long lasting of an experience.