The start of the project was quite slow, and because the previous project, Design Domain, was quite large and lengthy, I felt exhausted. Because of this, it took a long time to get excited again and during the first 2 weeks my mind was going from one idea to another.
However, I enjoyed Leon’s tutorials and his presence overall. Although his workflow was incredibly slow and during each of the tutorials we hadn’t achieved much, I liked the energy he radiated. It was helpful that he, as a specialist, could show how else we could make our triggers- for example by using audio and API. Both of these alternative methods have enormous potential and I think it would have been better if we were introduced to what’s actually possible. During the first 4 days, I thought that the only possible mechanic was picture scanning.
I was interested in making a work that could not be broken- a small turnoff for me in AR is how the scanner can lose the target and the generated output would disappear. Every time this happens it completely ruins immersivness and reminds that what you are looking at is fake.
One example would be a box through which one could slide through a tablet placed on its front and when it would come out, a spooky image would have appeared as if there would be a ghost inside. when opening up the box, the human eye wouldn’t see anything. This indirect experience would add wonderful darkness and mystery which wouldn’t break in the tablet itself. Although I considered playing with the ”visible by a camera, not by an eye” I realized that there were very few places where this could work. I did like how it resembled found-footage horror film scenarios.
I was also interested in using the space and sound. One idea, which I particularly liked, but found technically impossible was to record very silent sounds emitted by various devices and objects in the studio and to make an explorable space where the user could explore the minuscule audial world around them which they wouldn’t normally notice.
I liked that the idea had a very personal reasoning, given my interest in lowercase music, experimental music which focuses on amplifying tiny sounds like plants growing, and deep listening, a creative philosophy movement of sorts that promotes slow, conscious and careful listening and music-making. I also like how the output is much more subtle and the triggering mechanics would be used in a less ordinary way. I would still be interested in realising this idea if I ever meet a format which would work really well with this.
I also found the idea of working with posters nice and pleasant. It’s a medium I think AR would go together very well. I thought I got was to make a virtual exhibition. For some time I thought that as my final idea but discarded it because it seemed a bit boring and didn’t have much inertia. Even though I like the idea of making the exhibition respond to the format, for example, art from the game Second Life, it didn’t have much backbone.
I also thought of playing around with the idea of tourist pictures and the importance of taking a photo of a landmark. For example, the trigger could be an image of the Eifel tower and the user could photograph the picture, but the output picture would have the tower photoshopped out, “commenting on what importance we put into which objects when traveling”. While I liked, again, the less direct communcation, and how the camera and image targets were used as conceptual tools, but I realized that when i’m a tourist, I do the same things- go to museums, landmarks, cafes, ferries, hotels, mountains etc., so I had no right to judge on peoples actions regarding this.
The last idea, which I settled for was to make a game that would play around the idea of piracy and bootlegging. I would have a fragment of a film and the player’s task would be to record the whole thing without losing the target. If that would happen, the game would be lost. I was inspired by the phenomenon of bootlegging and how on The Pirate Bay as soon as a major film hits the theatres, long before a DVD/BluRay/Netflix release, there are already camera recording from the cinemas. I wanted to work with the thought of sneakily and carefully and illegally ripping a film for the pirate websites.
It seemed plausible to develop given how much time was left and it had a nice amount of quirk. Yes, conceptually it was quite simple, without any intellectual arguments and comments on piracy in general and didn’t try to solve big questions, I wanted to have a bit of a more relaxed structure. Given my previous project was very conceptual, I decided that it would be OK. Still, I found the biggest value and reason in the idea of embracing the format and taming its flaws. It also would have a bit more replay value and wouldn’t rely on ”5 seconds of surprise”- a type of user experience, something that a poster coming to life might have.
I decided that an easy and effective way of making it work would be to make everything video-based, instead of placing and scripting numerous UI elements. I would make the original video in a high-contrast frame so that Vuforia can properly respond. If the frame would appear, it would start a green-screened video file on the scanner device, if the scanner would lose the triggering frame, it would stop the video and play a ”game over” video clip.
Aesthetically I wanted to incorporate drawings made by me as recently I had found pleasure in doodling and by having fun making the interface, it would make the whole game more fun to play. I went for quite a literal setting of piracy with the leaders, NPCs giving instructions, being pirates and parrots. Although this choice not very groundbreaking I wanted to have some characters and pirates seemed the most intuitive way to go.
I started drawing out some of the designs. At first, I tried it by hand but it somehow didn’t go well so I moved to MS Paint. Because of the more digital format, the images seemed much more visually fitting to the digital nature of the work. After making a small demo of how it would look green-screened, I realized that line-art style wouldn’t work when combined with the realistic view of the camera, so I returned to paint and made some more detailed and colourful characters.
Because the images looked stiff, I re-traced the lines for most of the photos to make gifs from them. A very well known technique in 2D animation. It was very satisfying to do as I hadn’t animated anything for years but it is something that I very much enjoy doing.
During this time I had decided that I would use an official clip from the film Inception which could be found on YouTube because its a type of movie I can imagine being pirated (also, from experience). Interestingly, after looking up it is actually in the 5th place of the ”most pirated movies” top list.
For the title, I went for a reference to the System Of A Down album “Steal this album!” which, I believe, they released for free officially after it got leaked, so it kind of fit the theme.
Then I found myself having numerous Covid-19-like symptoms which meant that I would have to isolate myself for 2 weeks and try to make the project somehow at home. This was a problem as my project would require scripting, something that I did not know how to do and so I didn’t actually know how would I wrap everything. I decided to focus on all of the visual material, trigger design and UX/UI design first, as that is something that I knew enough to do myself.
First try at making the characters and encouraging phrases
Final coloured and animated images for the UI.
After I had made most of the visual elements, I went to try out how scanning would work. I started by testing out trigger suitability. It turned out that I would have to have the frames with exceptionally high contrast and with many patterns. Still, I managed to get a four-star rating for one, which I settled for, at least during the testing stages.
Test 1: Testing if the target image itself worked it would show a cube. It did.
Test 2: with a video within the triggering frame and a cube. I was worried that the changing video image could disrupt the target image. While the scanning process did become slightly less reliable, it still worked. The biggest issue was in the glossiness of my phone’s screen which I used as the trigger.
Test 3: a video within the frame + a video file rendered on the phone’s plane, which worked as expected.
Test 4: a video within the frame + output video rendered onto the GUI.
Test 5: A video within the frame + output video in GUI, bit green-screened. After watching some tutorials on how to make a video clip have a Chroma Key effect, managed to get it done quite easily
Here is a tutorial in German which I used: link
I didn’t however found a problem that upon triggering it made the video visible instead of playing it from start. Making it work would require scripting but couldn’t figure how exactly. The same went for making the process of losing the target to start the ”game over” screen.
It was also at this point when all of the school-related stuff started to break down. I was planning to finish scripting in the last 4 days, but it proved to be impossible because of this as I couldn’t leave the flat.
I was quite sad to hear that the project was cancelled as during the 3rd week I had found excitement in the project and had overcome the minor writer’s block. I would be genuinely willing to finish the project regardless of what’s going on around me and inside me, and to finish the year nicely, smoothly and as ”normal”, but with the summative assessment and the overall wrap-ups being moved as close as possible, there was no reason to do it. I would say it felt more like a statement of ”don’t even try, we don’t want to see anything. please leave”, which also was relevant to all of my other incomplete projects which I had hoped to dedicate a lot of my spare time during the big 3-week break. Of course, I would very much appreciate if the submittive assessment would have stayed in early May, but I completely understand why such a choice was made and so there is no reason to be angry.
I found the workflow of this project to be quite problematic as Unity has quite a steep learning curve and I didn’t feel like I have had enough knowledge to independently start developing the idea. I think a longer Unity project in which we would be introduced to scripting, an essential part of game development, would have been very valuable. Even though I had done the project, I still felt ”disabled”. Afterwards, as I was further developing my project I realized that I didn’t know how to do ANYTHING scripting-related but didn’t seem like asking help from tutors as it would be quite a spoonful of info, taking a lot of time to learn and all of the staff are quite busy with everything. Because of this, I mostly stuck with what I knew I could do instead of what I wanted to do.
This project was a similar case. Because my work would have required to use scripting, I didn’t know how to approach it. This felt quite limiting and I didn’t feel ready for it. Of course, there was a very significant lack of tutorials, but that was the situation we were all in and there was wasn’t much anyone could do.
𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖏𝖔𝖚𝖗𝖓𝖆𝖑 