Theme:
This week Clarice Tan and I collaborated to make an interactive animation you had to activate with your body, using the gyroscope form your phone.
Key Questions:
- How can we use our bodies in the creation of the work?
- What kind of work could we create that would allow us to combine our practices of animation/illustration and games design/programming?
- How can we make a work which requires the user to activate it with their body?
Context:
We considered other ideas but this one made us laugh just at the thought of it and we decided it was a good time to do something silly and fun. We decided to hedge our bets on the theme by addressing it in 2 ways; irregular body movement as content and as the method of interaction.
Snow globes are an interesting object in the context of play; part toy, part art. They have their own unique style of movement and dynamism as the free moving parts of them float around in the liquid in a way which doesn’t really simulate the movement of falling snow very well.
We wanted to emulate this surreal aesthetic in the movement and in the aesthetic, intentionally cutting our photos roughly and placing them in an illustrated space and simulating a very sluggish version of gravity.
Method:
- Clarice and I met via Discord to design our response
- We decided to make a 'virtual snow globe' that the user would have to activate by shaking their phone
- We took a series of photos of our bodies from different angles and Clarice cut them up to form the assets for the project
- Clarice illustrated the background in several layers - we had originally intended to have a parallax effect on the background which responds to rotatin of the phone
- Nick used Unity to build the response, with his phone acting as the input controller via Unity Remote
- The body parts are 2D physics objects with some variation on their drag and rotation so they appear to move uniquely
- A 2D collider script had to be written to automatically build colliders at the edge of the screen. This should work on any mobile device.
- The magnitude of the player's shake input is used to calculate weather the main image of our two figures should change to the 'scared' version. This version remains for 5 seconds and then resets.
Reflection:
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_globe