Assignment 6 - Part 1 "The Nautilus Game"

"The Nautilus game is designed for location-based entertainment (LBE) such as amusement parks. It is expected to last only five minutes in order to enable a large number of groups to experience it each day, and is designed for small groups of players, aged between 8-13 years, with no previous experience of computer games. "

http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw57/leikas.html

.

What the Nautilus game does is track the movement of people within the space through the use of pressure pads. This information is then used to manipulate the screen based graphics which are designed to allow the user to navigate through a three dimensional space. In the context of the game, this space is an underwater world and the user's can control a "virtual vehicle (a submarine.)" http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw57/leikas.html

.

I chose to use Nautilus for the compare contrast because I think it’s quite similar in nature. It’s immersive and allows its users to interact with an interface through movement in the physical space. Additionally, the Nautilus like our project is aimed at children. On the other hand, one of the major differences are that the Nautilus is a team adventure game where as ours is a more simply a story for children to read. Furthermore, while the Nautilus allows free movement as far as navigation is concerned, our project only allows navigation through a set of predetermined paths.

.

To back up the comparison I have found quite a few research papers that reflect on Nautilus.
http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw57/leikas.html
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~elec518/previous/hit2004/papers/Dong.pdf.
http://www.sfu.ca/~rwakkary/papers/p764-wakkary.pdf.
http://a.parsons.edu/~cherdlick/thesis/dec_research.pdf.

Since the presentation - storyline content

as far as the story line is concerned, i've been trying to write a first person adaption to the well known fairy tale. Although as I found, for a 'well known' story there are quite a few different versions. Some Red Riding Hood(rrd) dies in the end, some times rrd gets away, some times the grand ma is a troll...

i found a couple of stories and maybe we can use the different out comes to our advantage...
eg, if you chosse one path, the wolf eats rrd, on another, rrd gets away...

in one grand ma is taken by the wolf, in another, she turns into a troll...

this site has stories from different nationalities. Some interesting ones here...
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html#perrault

this one also has some good stories....
http://www.usm.edu/english/fairytales/lrrh/inventt.htm

i particulaly like the ending to this one...
http://www.fln.vcu.edu/grimm/redridinghood.html

thats it for now, i still have heaps of other work to do...

Since the presentation - storyline content

Since the presentation - On a technical Level

On a technical level we have chosen to simplify our project to level were perhaps it should run more easily. WE were told in the lecture before the break that some time simplicity is best. That coupled with our visit to the Vanishing Point Exhibit made us think that the simpler the design is the easier it may be to pull off.

Additionally, if the interactional part of the assignmnet is easy to complete then we can spend more time making the interaction more immersive like addding sounds and building sets and stuff.

Vanishing Point - Journey to the moon

Again this was a short film about something... It was a man who was .... I'm not sure actually. But it was half black and white footage and half stop frame charcoal animation. It reminded me of eraser head for some reason. I think thats why I could watch it for too long...

Vanishing Point - Pataphysical man

The science of imaginary solution.

Man spinning on head except upside down so it looked like he was spinning on the cieling. I think it said it was meant to reflect the divinci dimensions of humans or something...

Vanishing Point - Train no.8

This was alledgedly about showing how you can move forward and backward through space at the same time but to tell you the truth I found it nausiating to look at for to ong so I could really get into it ...

Vanishing Point - House

This was a looping ammount of footage taht showed a house with an endless ammount of water flooding out of it. The ideas was something about blending reality with sureality?

Vanishing Point - Tools life

I really like this one! It was a short coffee table type display that had like...10 metal objects on it.. Such things as a hammer and a spanner and a magnifying glasss.> Each time you touched an object a procjected animation would emmerge. For eg... The hammer... A glass would fall and break. A harmonica... some musical notes would appear. A giant zippo. A flame would come out...

Really like this peice. I couldn't figure out how it worked... I would've really k=liked to talk to the artiist.

Vanishing Point - Man with paper

Man with paper...

This one was some footage of a man covering himself with paper that was the same colour as the wall he was standing in front off. Eventually he "blended in" totally. It was more like a short film...

Vanishing Point - Front porch

In this peice there was a dogs head in a human body readin the news paper on the porch of an old house. It was appearing to read the paper but in reality it was more distracted by what was going on around it and out in front of the house.

Alledgedlly this was meant to symbolize humans obsession with the media...

Vanishing Point - Duk hem?

This peice was a projected peice of falling blue like particles and if you stood in front of the projection the the particles would appear to hit your sillouette and bounce off. It reminded me of David and Ians "Dance projection" thingy.

Vanishing Point - Parking

This is a dual screen peice that is not interactive. WE see a hand on the screen appearing to direct people and traffic around a city. I thought it was cool but I didn't really understand the peice. It woulve been good to get the artists point of view...

Vanishing Point - The SHy Picture

This peice is similar to a peice I had thought of doing for the ubiquitous computing assignmnet...

Its a picture that hangs on the wall and appears to be a still image but when motion is detected the picture comes to life and the characters of it run away. I really like this peice. Not only because of the interactivity but also because of the feeling of the characters with in the picture. Its an image that is taken from like the 1940s apparently and the characters and the decore are to the period. All the characters are looking in to the bottom right corner as though someone just fell over or some other catastrophy has occured...

Vanishing Point - Spotter

This peice reduces huge machines like aeroplanes to things that may be found in a zoo... aparently. People observe them and take photos but as well as that it showed people as minature in larger then life settings... Not really sure what its about but it reminds me of "Land of the Giants"...

Presentation

I was absent for the presentation last week because I had a case of food poisoning. I was unhappy that I missed it as I felt it would have been good to get the feed back from other groups who had done similar projects or just had a better understanding of what we were trying to achieve. I'm going to the art gallery tonight and will blog an entry about it.