Driving into imagination
Our project focuses on adding joy to people’s daily experience. We intend to focus on those who are too used to the normal driving experience and find it boring. We found many people have experienced a transition of feeling from being excited at driving when they first got license to being bored at it after some time of driving. Therefore, we hope that we might start from imitating a normal driving process to offering an extraordinarily fascinating “driving” experience. I seek to address the challenge of developing a daily routine into an imaginative and story-telling series of scenes, just like what happens in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. We suppose the impact of our project could be inspiring people to seek for fun even when they seem to be stuck in repetitive daily life.
Generally, our project aims to design a game that deviates from people’s daily experience and inspires imagination. To be more specific, we plan to put a physical steering wheel in front of the computer screen, as one of the inputs. On the screen, it is basically a road (we plan to draw that and use the “image” function to insert all the drawings) with all the common elements like lights, trees and so on. As the character in the game, who is on the wheel, drives along the road, there will be options for him/her to choose. According to his/her choice, the scene of the road will change, gradually and more and more away from reality. For instance, at first the scene is just a rainy day with a gray sky, but as the audience explore the game further, it might rain diamonds from the pink sky. What’s more, we will use key function to allow the audience to control the basic equipment on the car such as the windscreen wiper or the radio. Similarly, as the game goes further and more choices are made, these keys start to generate unexpected effects like turning on the lights alongside the road. We will draw most of the effects and upload it to processing. For the car radio part, we are thinking about using speakers.
To analyze the needs of my intended audience, I plan to keep asking and inviting people to view my project before I finish it. Through this, they may ask questions, make advice and require different functions. That is how I plan to conduct a small-scale user test constantly.
In the next few weeks, we decide to construct an outline for the whole game in the first week, find the proper steering wheel and figure out how to connect all these circuits. Also, we need to have some idea about how to code it, or at least the structure of the coding. For the next week, we are going to draw all the scenes in details, transform different pieces of music to code and add them to our coding. Meanwhile, we need to perfect the physical design of our project. In the remaining time, we need to keep testing our project and modify it according to others’ advice.
Based on my preparatory research, I first thought about making an interactive platform that can record people’s typing process, which may deliver more information than what they eventually send as message. However, when I try to dig into the planning part, my partner and I found there were some technique problems, as well as practical problems. What if in most cases, people just made typing mistakes randomly instead of modifying or cancelling unsaid messages? And if so, recording will then be less meaningful. That was how the interactive printer I found as an inspiring object connected to my original idea. Meanwhile, I started to reflect on another interactive object I found. Before, I thought Bandersnatch was not innovative at making interactive films. However, I thought it over, I realized that the reason I thought it was not interactive was that Bandersnatch was limited by its form, a film. As I read in the reading about physical programming, the way people interact with computers is limited within the keyboard and the screen. There is really not much Bandersnatch can do in this aspect. This thought helped me generate my second idea about my project. I attempted to add more methods of interacting with the computer, which was why Ning and I considered connecting a real steering wheel in order to create a driving scene. We first thought about using the wheel to control the music channel, but as Rudi has suggested, this connection might be a little confusing to the audience because it did not align with people’s common sense and there was no explicit explanation. Therefore, we changed our idea a little. By producing a story-telling game in which the first perspective is from the driver’s view, we intend to achieve interaction by allowing the audience to control the wheel and changing the scene accordingly with a timeline. We stepped a little further than Bandersnatch by trying to add physical elements to our project (of course, the quality of the content of Bandersnatch should be way better). Also, as I was searching online, I found virtual biking very inspiring. The audience gained a pleasant biking experience without changing his/her position and most of the experience was achieved by the screen. That aligned with my definition of interaction because the product of virtual biking served as s tool for the audience to create an excellent experience themselves. It was also similar to what we wanted to do, but we would like to make our project a less intensive game by adding the story-telling part. By analyzing different choices made by the audience, we present different styles of drawing, different scenes and different kinds of imaginations. Our project, at least as I think, is unique both in the aspect of designing and the purpose behind. By making such a game, combining the virtual experience and physical feeling of driving, we intend to offer inspiration to those who are tired of following daily routines. I am willing to share my imagination by developing the daily scenes into grotesque but fascinating fictions. Also, through this, I intend to let the audience think about how imaginations can lead people to create joy from daily life and get encouragement from it.
After the completion of my project, there must be lots of space to improve. At the point of the very beginning of this project, I could only say that there must be more ways to make the physical feeling of driving more real, maybe by adding more equipment. If this project can be perfected further, perhaps we can put it on the street for passers-by to have a try. It is less possible to make it into a commercial product both because it requires too many physical equipment and it deviate from our original purpose of just offering an extraordinary experience as possible inspiration to other people.