Category: Inmi

The Epic of Us

The idea of this project is to make a digital board game that takes the area of around 1.5 square meters. On the cardboard, we will raster a road that winds through, and along the road, there will be 2D scenery drew with laser cutter. Every several inches along the road there will be an LED implying one step, and by interacting with the computer program hooked onto the cardboard, two players will be virtually going down the road and experience a series of events.

The game goes like this:

Two players each represents a country, and they will be told that the goal of this game is to destroy the other player’s country with weapons they obtain during the game to be the winner. On the computer program, there will be an animation of a dice and the two player’s HP values. A button is connected to the program for the user to interact.

When it comes to the first player’s turn, she first presses the button and the dice will randomly display one side among the six, and the player will march forward the number of steps displayed on the dice. The LED will blink on the place where she arrives. There will be an event preset for every step such as “people in your country just invented stone swords” or “there is an earthquake happened in your country, go back 2 steps”. Whenever a player arrives at a step after she tosses the dice, a message box will tell the user about the event.

After that, if the event is about the player going forward or back several steps, the according LED will blink again but no event will happen the second time she moves in a round. But if the event is about a weapon invented, the program will let the user decide how much HP she wants the other user to drop. The process of determining the amount of points goes like this: a bar will appear on the screen, and the fill of the bar is constantly moving back and forth between 0% to 100%. The user presses the button to stop the moving and the place where the fill stops represents how much percent of the weapon’s power she wants to use against her opponent.

(For example, if the weapons “stone sword” has the power of 200, and the user stops the bar at 40%, then her opponent’s HP value will drop by 40%*200, which is 80 points.)

This way, the user can choose whether to be friendly with her opponent or destroy her opponent’s country.

There is an indication in this game that along the road, pictures printed beside it is different. At the be beginning of it, there are natural and primary things there such as mountains and trees representing a backward society. But as the users continues to play and reaches the later steps, the pictures printed along the road would become houses, castles, and finally high-rises to indicate the technological development of the society. Of course, as the game goes into later stages and the technology develops, the weapons they get will become increasingly powerful. At the beginning of the game, a player can only cut the other player’s HP by 10 or 20 points. But as they approach the end of the road, the weapon they get will be so powerful that if they hit near 100% in the bar, they can cut as much as thousands of the other user’s health points. If any player’s HP goes to 0, the game ends. Else if one user reaches the end of the road, the game also ends.

However, if one player’s country reduces the other’s HP to zero, the program would not notify that she wins. Instead, it will say that the weapon this country uses is so powerful that both countries fell into ruins during the war, and no one wins. We designed the game to actually warn the players that it is no good for the countries in our real life to compete against each other, and this endless arms race on the international stage is only going to waste money in vain and bring sorrow and fear to the people, just like what happened during the cold war. It is obvious that if crisis such as the Iran’s nuclear issue and Cuba missile crisis keep happening then no one will be the winning on earth. Just like our game, in the end the competition will only put the entire human race in a vulnerable place of diminishing together.

But in our game, there is another ending. If the players choose not to attack the other country by stopping the movement of the bar at very small percentage and both countries survive with a lot of HP remaining (exactly how much is still under discussion) when one of the player reaches the final step, the program is going to notify that both players have won this game. This is a metaphor that collaboration between countries will bring prosperity to all nations around the world. Although our game does not offer a concrete solution to the negotiation between countries in the real world, we do want to increase awareness among common people. It will tell a cautious tale in a fun but educative way to adults and kids alike.

While I feel that the concept is pretty finalized, the details of the game design is still a large challenge for us. Since there are stories and events going on during the game, we want to make the game balanced and playable. Also, programming is going to be hard because everything about the content should be embedded in the processing codes. How to link the many LEDs to Arduino boards is also a huge problem. (I am currently thinking about using a tiny car that has a trail tracking sensor on it to go along the road as a substitute for LEDs.)

Next week, we want to figure out how we want to represent the users taking steps or going forward: whether we want to use LEDs or using other methods. We also want to go to the ARC to talk about how we are going to realize our programming with processing. During the week of 12/1-7, we want to focus on programming and designing the look of the board. During the last week before due, we will put everything together and run user tests.

Throughout this semester, I defined interaction as “the process in which two parties involved repeatedly send information through media such as words, sound, image, physical movements, etc., while receiving the other’s information simultaneously.” And I set a criterion for interactive relationships that “the more types of information are involved, the more interactive this relationship is.” I think our project fits my definition of interaction because when playing this game, the computer will be telling users information, and the users will tell the computer back about their decisions. This is a continuous process which involves a lot of ways to transmit information such as the blink of LEDs, virtual and real patterns and pictures, and words from message boxes. We want our users to really engage in this game, so we designed both the computer program where they can get all the information and the board on a table so that people can still be face-to-face when they play the game and enjoy the time with their friends.

While we have a lot of pre-written events and endings to show to the players, we want them to get the metaphor of this game by themselves. That’s why we designed the indications such as the development of arms technology. Just as Tom Igoe wrote in his blog, “if you’re thinking of an interactive artwork, don’t think of it like a finished painting or sculpture.  Think of it more as a performance. Your audience completes the work through what they do when they see what you’ve made.” Only by driving the users to think themselves can they have a deeper understanding of the issue. Since our project is more of a one-time thing (because once you understand the indication, the game wouldn’t be fun anymore), I think its future development may be in a mall or a public place where passers-by and come near and try it. The idea is quite similar to the project “dancing traffic light” I mentioned in my participatory research. When people come across them in a public place, interacting with them helps to solve a social problem.

Reference

Final Essay

By Lifan Yu

A. PROJECT TITLE: “Save Me From Plastics”

 B. PROJECT STATEMENT OF PURPOSE:

      Me and Xinran focus on an environmental problem: plastic pollution. Plastic in the ocean harm marine animals. Animals die from accidentally eating plastic pieces because they stay in their bodies and cause them diseases. Also, plastic is difficult to decompose, they stay in natural environment for a long time.

According to a recent study, humans have produced 8,300,000,000 tons of plastic waste ever since the year of 1950. However, most of these plastic wastes were not properly treated. Only 9% of them are recycled, 12% are burned. However, as much as 79% of all these wastes were dumped into landfills or thrown into the ocean.

According to professor Jenna Jambeck from University of Georgia, most of these plastic wastes do not have any biodegradations. They will stay in these natural environments for hundreds or thousands of years. Not only will this harm wild animals but also lessen safe lands that we can live in.

Inspired by these, we try to design an interactive game that encourages people to use less plastic product and find ways to treat plastic wastes that do less harm to our environment. Our intended audience is people who are still not fully aware what a huge negative impact we have on our environment with all those plastic trash. We intend to raise environmental awareness, maybe people can have a more careful thought about this matter after enjoying this game and adopt a way of living with less use of plastic products.

C.PROJECT PLAN

      We plan to create an interactive two-players game that raises awareness on plastic pollution and promote environmental actions.

The game screen can be projected on a wall like this:

      Our game screen looks like this:

     Players stand in front of this wall. One player controls the motion of a person. Another player controls the motion of a fish in the sea. Plastic products like plastic bottles will fall from above (one at a time, but they fall from random places) , representing all the tempting plastic products we encounter each day and use naturally without thinking about their impact on our environment. If the person does nothing, the products are automatically being “accepted” for use by this person and soon thrown into the sea—just like what garbage treatment people do with plastic waste—dumping them into the sea. If the person moves around and purposefully “reject” using plastic products (in this game, by blocking them), those products will disappear, representing less usage of plastic products.

      The first player controls motion of the person by pushing four separately placed buttons in front of them. The person on the screen move to different places when different buttons are pushed. The player controls motions of the fish using a handle. This player tries to avoid touching all the randomly moving plastic pieces.

      Whenever the person successfully rejects the usage of a plastic product, a green light beside the screen will blink. The green light has a caption on “I used less plastic product today!” When they fail to reject, a red light with a caption of “used one more plastic product” will blink.

      There will be some already existing plastic pieces in the sea, but there will be more when more plastic pieces are thrown in to the sea by people. If the fish touches any pieces of plastic, it dies and people lose the game. If the fish is still alive after a certain period of time (such as two minutes), the players win this game.

      When they win the game, a sign (attached to a servo motor) will began to wave and instruct them to pick up a candy. they can pick up a candy from a candy box beside. Another computer is put beside the candy box. There will be a quiz question about our main theme: “About how many percentage of plastic waste is thrown into the ocean and landfills?” A. 10%, B. 30% C. 50% D. 80%. Four buttons represent A B C D. When D is pressed, a servo motor will more the candy box out and players can take candies from it. We will leave a piece of post-it note on each candy, we will write on them some actions people can take to minimize plastic pollution.

empathize with our intended audience:

      People usually don’t like it when they are told seriously about some distressing environmental problems. So this game introduces how we accept using lots of plastic products naturally and how hard life will be for those poor fish surrounded by plastic waste in a simple and fun way.

Our game is both interactive, fun and rewarding: players can not only gain knowledge of plastic pollution, be more aware of this environmental problem but also get delicious candy. Before they get candy, the quiz question will leave a deep impression on them. This will be a fun and effective way of promoting environmental actions.

Detailed Plan:

      We will finish building the candy box circuit and the code of the small candy device, and the code of the background image and the ‘person’ part of the game. In the second week, we will finish all code and the main device, the last week is for user testing and improvements.

D. CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE:

Projects I’ve researched:

      Scott Snibbe’s “Arctic Ice”

      “Arctic Ice is an interactive immersive exhibit on global warming that tells the complicated story of feedback loops in melting arctic ice that are a major component of climate change.”

      People are actually experiencing “being part of this process”. They wave their hands to help “reflect” sunlight. At the same time, they see how the feedback loops warm up the ocean and melt ice—which greatly affect polar bears—by decreasing their living areas. This game, as is shown in the video, is highly interactive. Real-time feedback animations such as the melting of ice and the reflection of sun rays are happening all the time.

These inspired us to create a project also highly-interactive: plastics moving randomly in the sea, the player controls the fish to move around, these are all happening all through the whole game experience. People are also playing decisive roles: the amount of plastics in the “sea” is decided by the first player. Also, people really experience the hard lives of marine animals in an ocean environment full of plastics by trying to avoid plastic pieces in the “sea”.

Align with my definition of interaction:

      the process of an actor (a device, a person, an animal etc.) constantly communicating with the other “actor”. That is, it can detect the information of the other “actor” constantly. The other actor can also respond to the device’s movements, sounds etc. This type of communication can last for a long time instead of ending after a few simple movements.

      The project we will make aligns well with this. People move around and control movements of their game characters actively according to the moving images. And different things “such as the dying of the fish” will happen when people do certain things or fail to do certain things. This game lasts for a certain time. In the game process, feedbacks will be made constantly.

What’s unique and significant about our project/Values/Audience:

      Our project allows players to play a role in a serious environmental problem in a fun way.

      This can promote an environmentally-friendly value of using less plastic product (generating less plastic waste) and stop disposing them irresponsibly into natural environment.

      For people who are not yet aware of the seriousness and urgency of this environmental issue, this project, if successfully made, will lead them at least to think about plastic waste problems seriously, or more, inspiring them to use less plastic products in daily life and use more environmentally-friendly products. This will lead people to reflect on their own actions: using all those plastic products without thinking much about the environment. Also, this game leads people to empathize with the poor fish. Influencing people to take small and practical actions is more effective than only calling out blank slogans.

      Subsequent projects can be built upon the already existing game rule, but adapt a better form of interaction, such as using the people’s shadows on the screen instead of requiring people to push buttons. Or, there can be more physical models built that can move to give audiences a more real experience.

      Subsequent projects can also be better connected to the world in real time and make real changes in the world. Such as, the United Nation’s “Free Rice. Com”.

When we answer one question right on this website, they will donate one grain of rice to people in hunger all cross the world. I hope our future project can adapt a system like this. I would like my projects to focus on the themes of bettering our world, saving our environment and helping people in need. By presenting these values, these projects are truly meaningful. Targeted audience are those who not yet know much about a certain contemporary problem. We can raise awareness and open people’s eyes to things that they don’t usually observe about this world.

Fragmented Faces

Our project is titles “Fragmented Faces” and aims to tackle the complex issue of identity and humans’ connections with others.

 PROJECT STATEMENT OF PURPOSE 

Our project aims to demonstrate the complexity of human identity and how identity can be represented through faces, emotions, and expressions. It also aims to show how complex and disorrienting understanding identity is when a person interacts with more and more people. The project entails using different images of peoples’ faces and cutting the images into three horizontal sections, and then randomizing the different pieces to create different faces out of many mouths, eyes, and noses. 

Our audience can be generalized to entail everyone as it is focused on inclusion and understanding the identities around us, but the audience can also be a more focused group of people who are trying to understand the identities of people who surround them and who are putting effort into understanding the complexity of identity. This project was mostly inspired by a few art pieces one video of an interactive simulation about identity crises and the complexity of self identity and the other focusing on the fragmentation and complexity of identity.

Inspirational identity artwork

 PROJECT PLAN 

This project aims to create a dialogue and questions about identity and the connections people make based on identity, which are represented by each light-up pressure pad with a hand silhouette showing the connection. The simulation or game entails the user standing in front of the processing screen and 5-6 pressure pads each with a hand print that lights up. The different handprints will light up in a sequence that gets faster and faster and people will try to keep up with the lights, pressing their hand against the light up hand. Each time a button is pressed the faces will randomize. At first, when the simulation is easy to follow it will be easy to connect with each hand and see each identity change and create a new face, but as the simulation gets faster and more complex people will be unable to keep up with each individual interaction and the identities appearing on the screen. Once the simulation becomes impossibly complex all the hands will blink in unison and then turn off except the center hand which will remain lit and once the user presses it all the individual original images of the faces will appear together on the screen.

To complete this project we first will start with the processing and create a simple random face generator with one button and different image. I have already created the base code for that which has three images of faces correctly proportioned but is not randomized to include multiple options yet. After we create the processing basic code for random images, we will then add multiple buttons to control the randomization of the faces. This will be the prototype for the simulation. Next we will create the LED light flashing separately and simultaneously in Arduino and after figuring the two pieces out separately we will combine the codes and add LEDs to the buttons, which we will create out of cardboard or wood and plastic so the LEDs can show the hands lighting up. We would like to finish the basic processing code for the random faces this weekend. And add the signal communication and LED sequence by the end of next week. After the LEDs and the processing animation controlled by buttons are combined the work will mostly be focused on creating the environment and set up of the game, including the hand buttons.

The work-in-progress code for assembling random faces in processing.

Examples for the light up had prints that will also serve as buttons/pressure plates to cause the faces to change.

CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE 

Originally I researched projects on light and sound designs including a storytelling animated wall. This project in general led me to think about the animation in processing which has gone through different variation but ultimately involve fragmented piece coming together to create a whole. Originally, I wanted to animate a process that I saw artist do still versions of people’s faces breaking into small pixel like units and the art piece becomes more and more abstract. But after talking it over, an easier and more straight forward animation to represent this fragmentation creating a whole would be to use three horizontal panels to create a whole image. Our project was more influenced by non-interactive art pieces that represented identity as it was harder to find interactive art exhibits that focus on issues of identity of human connection. Our project was also in part influenced by the Piano Dancer project proposal I suggested as our user interface will be quite similar with light up hand prints acting as buttons, similar to the light up piano keys. This project follows our expanded definition of interaction beyond the simple understanding of two actors communicating through input, processing, and output as discussed in What Exactly is Interactivity?. Interaction involves the entire experience including people thinking and possibly creating a dialogue about a project. As I researched interactive art is also based on ideas like TATE, interactive art was also a method for the artists to make connections with the environment and their audience, enhancing both the interactive elements coming from the audience and from the machine/art piece. Each art piece is created by an artist, who has an intention for their piece and the audience, whether that is completely understood and achieved or not. Combining all the definitions of interaction researched, a successful interactive experience consists of two actors who communicate using a series of inputs, processing, and output; however, the overall experience created enhances the interaction, including forcing the audience to think differently and more specifically about an issue or thoughtful concept. Every interactive experience exist at a different amount of interaction. Some interactions are simple interactions between two parties that meet the basic requirements of input, processing, and output, and some interactions are closer to human interactions that are always changing and evolving responding to each actor’s last action, including physical but also complex mental interaction. With our midterm project and now also the final project “Fragmented Faces” we hope to push our audience’s interaction to involve a more complex level of interaction, including contemplation of the work and the meaning of it, to hopefully create a dialogue or through process about what identity means and how its easy to stop understanding others’ identities the more interactions and connections you are having with people. The confusion of the hands and light/button sequence represents the chaos of understanding identity. Hopefully, this project’s uniqueness will come from creating a new dialogue or prompting people to think about identity and connections they make with people. Although the face swap and randomizer has been done before in other projects, we have specified out focus around what identity is and what it means to connect with people. We added the simulation/game of light up hands to create a more complex and ever changing interaction between the audience and the project. Many of the projects we looked at in researching identity artwork showed the fragmentation and confusion of self identity and other, and much of identity artwork is left much up to interpretation. Our project creates and interactive and changing interface for people to engage with a changing and confusing identity, building off of their artwork around identity. I especially appreciated the chaos and complexity of self identity represented in this simulation (mentioned and linked above too). Our main goal with this completed project is to spark either physical conversation and dialogue or internal thoughts and contemplation over what identity means to different people and with how chaotic life is and how many people one meets during life, they don’t truly understand the identity of most people because we don’t take the time to think about each individual. This project could in the future be built upon to understand and complicate the concept of self identity if the project also involved capturing people’s faces and including them in the random face generator. Particularly, our message fits with an audience of people who are interested in exploring the concept of identity and understanding the people around them, to better be able to talk and interact with others in the future. This goal especially fit with the mindset of many NYUSH students who come to this school to make connections and meet people from all over the world with very different backgrounds. But the longer these students become complacent talking to the same people from the same backgrounds the less they think about people from different backgrounds with different identities.

1. PROJECT TITLE

Reconsider Human-Nature Relationship

PROJECT STATEMENT OF PURPOSE *

This project aims at addressing the question of “human-nature” relationship. The insights we’ve found are first an art work in our school’s gallery called the 72-relations with a goldenrod. And another internet interactive art project called “way to go”. These two works narrow our idea and make it tangible. Our project provides experience for users to explore different ways that one can interact with nature and then reflect back on our own behavior in daily life.

PROJECT PLAN *

Our project is a screen-based VR experience. Users interact with multiple sensors physically and it results in different visuals on the screen. We will gather our shooting footage by Nov.23 and edit it by Nov.24. On Nov.25-27, we will start to figure out the code in Arduino and processing with the help of professors and fellows as well as online tutorials. We need to know first, what kinds of sensors we need in terms of “relation between nature”. Second, how to add animations onto a pre-shot video. Third, how to switch between different scene we’ve shot. On Nov.28-30, the thanksgiving holiday, as we already have a basic structure in our code, we will try to modify it on our own. By Dec. 2, we will manage to run through the whole project, make the Arduino and processing communicating with each other. For the rest of the week, we need to design for which part we want to use fabrication tools to help us as well as user testing and further improvements.

CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE *

In our preparatory research and analysis, we define interaction as a kind of conversation where two or more actors are involved. They listen (receive the information), think (process the information) and speak (give out the processed information). In the projects we’ve looked at, two things inspired us. First is the how to trigger user’s motivation to interact. We found out that users are more possible to interact when they see themselves in the screen (for example, using mirrors). So, we decided in the transition of different scene, the users can see themselves by involving web cam in our project. The second thing is that when there’s more people interacting together, it gets more fun. So, with different sensors, our project lets multiple users to explore together. after successful completion, our project leads the users to think about their relations with nature and to reflect on their everyday behavior. The idea of this project is inspired by our humanities course which the topic is “the question of the Anthropocene”. We begin to think about how we can better coexist with nature, to keep the harmony between human and the environment. I guess this is the biggest significance of our project. This project aims at users of all ages, because the question of human and nature is a question that involves all of us.