Link:
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~kv795/week13/index.html
Partner: Manal
- Design
Due to our project not ending as expected, I will describe both the planned and the real final form. Our project’s planned final form was a an internet based window, which should symbolize a real space (a room) with people and the way they interact. There should be in total three rooms in between which the viewer can switch and the background of these rooms should be sketched in a very minimalistic way to hint on what kind of space they are – e.g. library, cafĂ©, metro.Each room should have around 5 people and each of them should be in at least two of the mentioned spaces. These people are represented by “floating” simple geometric shapes, which are in constant movement and bounce of the walls the same way the old Windows screensavers do and they represent the strangers the viewer can encounter once he enters to him a foreign space.
Our project is meant to lead the viewer through a narrative. This narrative starts by the viewer opening our website. He will be added into the “field” of floating people and will be told what is his icon. Immediately after entering, he will start receiving strange messages in a message box at the top of the screen. These messages are form a stalker and will grow on intensity, defining the time of the narration. The goal of this project is to make the viewer feel he has to find the stalker before the stalker finds him. The viewer can get more information by colliding with the other people icons, that sometimes give away hints about the space they are in, about the stalker and about the viewer himself. The viewer cannot control his own movement, but can change the movement of the people around him by clicking on their icons and changing their direction towards him.
When the messages from the stalker escalate, in the last second the view is supposed to change to a blurry image of a psychiatrist leaning over the viewer, telling him he forgot to take his meds again.
Due to various reasons we only managed to create a website that has one window, no background and has interacting floating icons which, whenever they collide with the viewer will produce a bubble with a different message.
- Process
At the beginning we struggled to come up with a solid and at the same time executable project idea. After consultation with academic fellows, we decided on an idea, which was in the time frame we had rather challenging. We still decided to go with it because both of us seemed to be very interested in this idea and we believed if we worked hard and well divided the workload, we could make this idea work. Due to various reasons the workload did not end up being divided equally and in the end basically only the coding part was worked on. This makes me think if I were to consider this project again, I would have done it alone from the beginning, with an easier concept that would be doable by just one person. Also due to sudden data loss, I was then not able to wrap up the coding section as I had to recode everything I lost before. This is one of my greatest regrets, because although I saved my files on an external disk (or so I thought so), I ended up losing all of my .js files. After the erasure, I started frequently updating my file on the cyberduck in order to ensure no such thing would happen again. It also allowed me to in real time test the website and notice right away if there was an issue with the code. This proved very useful, as combination of P5 canvas and normal .js is very fragile and prone to dysfunctioning, which is often very hard to uncover. This is a part I didn’t anticipate during my project planning and it in the end greatly influenced the stage into which I got my code, because in the end I spent hours on debugging my code. Due to some reason there is a problem with combination of iteration, pulling out timing from an array with times and pushing text into a div. This is so far the biggest challenge in the code. I also learned that all of the javascript files are read by the computer as one.
- Future
Given more time I am planning to finish this project, as I believe I could still learn a lot from it as well as I believe if properly finished, it could be an interesting experience for the user. There is more work to be done not only on the visual part of the website, but on the script as well. The script together with the right timing is the main factor influencing the successfulness of this project, as it is mostly based on psychological effects this website has on the viewer.
After the finals end I am still planning to at least completely finalize the code frame so the only thing left to do would be entering the scripts and editing the visual parts.