In preparation for a presentation of ideas - something that will most likely take place next Monday - two ideas need to be chosen and then explored in further depth as to how they will work and what tools will be needed to be able to implement them successfully in an interactive space.

Of the five ideas that were mentioned in the previous post, three have been selected. Whilst the presentation only requires two; there are three ideas that would work well in an interactive space. The first of which is The Independent Shadow.

The independent shadow mimics the users actions for a brief period of time, before suddenly taking a life of its own. It would then act out a pre-animated scene, followed by exploding into lots of smaller shadows (using the 3D Studio Max particle system) which chase each other the screen to end the event. The idea has lots of complications and flaws however that might not make it feasible for this event. For a start, each user would have to wear motion sensors so the shadow could copy their movements for that first ten seconds. Something that’s not very practical if it turned out to be a popular activity.

Another idea that stands out is the Virtual Decorating. This would involve various users drawing images onto a touch screen smart phone, or onto a tablet PC, which are then projected onto a wall. There would be four projectors (one for each wall) allowing lots of space for a giant multi user virtual environment. Tablet PCs would reside outside the room, so people could show up at the exhibition and draw their images; whilst at the same time, team members would walk around the campus (or wherever you happen to be) and ask people to draw a small image onto a smart phone, which is then sent over a LAN to the computers connected to the projectors. There’s a lot of potential in this idea it wouldn’t be too difficult to put together. In addition it could be very fun seeing what people come up with.

The final idea is the Virtual Earthquake. A series of pressure mats are lined up along a walkway next to a screen or wall. A scene is projected onto the wall of a forest or city, and as people walk over the mats the city starts to shake. The harder the mats are stepped on, the more it rattles; perhaps people in the city fall over, or the birds in the forest fall out of trees. As the user starts really hammering on the mats and jumping up and down, the environment experiences a full on earthquake. Buildings collapse, trees fall over. The image would be completely dynamic, and would react to the amount of pressure that mats are put under. There is also a huge scale of possibility in the type of images that could be used as well as their formats, such as photographs, collages, hand drawn images, 3D models etc.

The focus from now on will be these three ideas. Perhaps less so on the Independent Shadow as there are a lot of complications that might take too long to work around. The potential within the later two ideas is very high too, so perhaps there will be more focus on those, rather than all three.