The first game my project was inspired by was a memorization game in which you continuously flip through tiles to find matching ones. This is more of a general game idea that I was inspired by. What I don’t like about this game is how restricted it is, in which you have to match two tiles, and how it has a slower game speed. However, I do like the idea of the flipped tiled interface and memorization aspect.
Tiles^2
Tiles2 is an Iphone game developed by Andrew Abosh in 2018. The premise of the game is that you have three seconds to memorize a sequence of tiles, and you have to select those tiles in chronological order. I like the fast paced atmosphere of the game, but don’t like the restrictive nature of the numbered tiles, and how the game is immediately over once you select an incorrect tile.
For this looking outwards, I found two projects that relate to webcam art or are interactive program that overlay over a photo.
The first project I found is called Webcam Toy, a website that takes selfies using a variety of photo filters that react to the figure in the frame. Webcam Toy is developed by Paul Neave, a British based programmer and designer who has been designing for over 20 years and focuses on making playful software that incorporates imagination. Webcam Toy has a bunch of filters that warp and mirror the camera at different point of the canvas, and also draws elements on top of the webcam, such as fire or snow that falls on top of the person’s head.
A photo of me using Webcam Toy’s underwater filter. Webcam Toy’s interface and website.
The second project I found is a website called BeFunky, which takes a photo as an input, and has a number of options for effects and filters that can be applied to the image. Some of these filters involve detecting different color gradients in the image and recoloring them. This project was developed by the BeFunky team that is a group of software developers who were motivated to create a tool that lets anyone recreate beautiful photographs without having to learn technical software like Adobe Photoshop.
BeFunky interface showing unaltered, original photo.Photo with line art filter from BeFunky.
This landscape project was made by shifting pixel sorting data out of landscape photos into a 2D noise matrix. This is great because I have been just thinking about filling shapes with solid colors, but this is using computated elements to draw. For my project, I could maybe use turtles to generate patterns for filling in shapes, or use interesting line drawings.
Work Description: “By 2050, there will be more plastics than fish in the sea.” by Benjamin Von Wong
This work is inspirational because it is a setup representation that has great depth and clarity. Because climate change is a very complex issue, I will have to find ways to symbolize or very clearly represent the message I want to convey. This also similarly to the first work uses colors of plastic bottles to create depth in color, as opposed to making the water area just plain blue.
For my final project, I want to create an interactive art that takes the viewer to different places. One project I found that was inspiring is the Quantum Fluctuations: Experiments in Flux that was created by Markos Kay. As a digital artist who is fascinated by science, this project depicts the “complexity and transient nature of the most fundamental aspect of reality”: the Quantum world. Kay worked with several scientists working on the Large Hardon Collider at the CERN, Geneva for this project. Using the particle simulations that were done by a supercomputer as his brush and paint, he created digital art that shows what happens during a proton collision. This project stood out since he is showcasing a natural phenomenon in rather artificial manner. All the sceneries in Howl’s Moving Castle (my project) are dreamy and exaggerated realities. Given the fictional context, I hope to depict reality yet in dream-like manner similar to Kay’s project.
Second project I found was the Cloud Portal installation by Ned Kahn in San Francisco, CA. Kahn also explores the interdisciplinary field of art and science. He is specifically interested in the fluid motion of water, fog, sand and light, which he uses to depict the complex and continually changing systems. His project, Cloud Portal, is constructed with stacked horizontal sheets of stainless steel, and mist that represents the cloud appears from the central void of the portal. This project reminded me of Berndnaut Smilde’s cloud installations.
Cloud Portal by Ned Kahn in Davis Court, San Francisco.
Although Kahn’s works are physical installations in contrast to the digital art by Kay, they both illustrate our scientific reality by recreating natural phenomenon artificially.
This week, I looked at two different projects similar to what my group is working on as our Final Project. The first project is a fairly “name brand” project taken under by Snapchat, and that is Snapchat’s Filters. Snapchat filters are quite interesting. They allow users real-time augmented reality through their own smartphone, allowing them to tune their faces, create mini animations, or just simply make it look like a cute puppy. It is interesting to see that this facial recognition technology is a relatively old technology, but Snapchat was able to innovate it and revitalize it in its current market!
Sonification of personal (DNA) data
Moreover, there is going to be an aspect of our project that plays music. I found a project by Pierry Jaquillard at ECAL Media and Interaction Design Unit. In this project, Pierry takes a person’s DNA and turns it into music notes. As of now the project only has Pierry’s DNA. It includes all 23 chromosomes, which are run through different interfaces in order to create different results. He uses Javascript to process the notes to a visualization. Then, he uses the visuals to encode a musical file. Though this project is definitely out of our scope for the final, it is interesting what designers can make out of the smallest and least-connected items!
a visual from Nour, Terrifying Jellyfish’ most well-known game
Nour is an interactive visual game focused on playing with food and its aesthetics. Controls can range from keyboard to external plug-in controllers that send note signals. Nour was created by TJ Hughes, a video game designer and digital artist, and also founder of Terrifying Jellyfish, an independent game company that focuses on releasing content with “color, playfulness, and aesthetics”.
Cooking Mama, the famous Nintendo DS game first released in 2006.
The second project is the famous Nintendo DS game, Cooking Mama, which is a food cooking simulation game that takes the player through the various steps of cooking a recipe. Cooking Mama was developed by Cooking Mama Limited, formerly Office Create, a game developing company.
the player engages directly with the cooking process offered by the simulation.
Cooking Mama was a childhood favorite game for me; something about being able to cook all these recipes on a touch screen was so satisfying and addicting. The differences between Cooking Mama and Nour lies in the aesthetics focus of the games; while Cooking Mama is more focused on actually simulating the cooking process, Nour has no goals or objectives in the game. Nour is an experimental food art game that focuses on the visuals and unconventional ways of playing with food.
Our goal for our final project is to take inspiration from both these projects to create a visually appealing, interactive cooking experience.
One project, found online, was an interactive map by Sara B. It contained offices, a countryside, playground, house, and industries. This map was coded to be a 3D model coming out of a tablet. This was coded through a studio using images, shapes, and mouse functions. I admired this project because it gave the audience a better understanding of the layout of a certain area showing all different types of places.
Furthermore, another project I looked at was a hotel’s website in Lower Manhattan of New York City called, “Sister City”. This website used ideas of simplicity, purposefulness, and mindful design powered by Microsoft’s Custom Vision Service. This helped analyzed elements of the Sister City environment just from a camera on the roof. With artificial intelligence, the system recognized aspects of nature such as clouds and birds and triggered specific sounds to the installation. These sounds were then generated and installed in the lobby of the hotel creating a more natural environment to space in a very new setting. The ambient music formed an ambiance of the hotel, creating a more relaxed atmosphere overall. This was a very interesting take and immediately made me mesmerized.
The two projects together are so different but creative at the same time, which are what drew me from the very beginning. Both ideas pertain to my final project in the sense that Gretchen Kupferschmid and I want to design a 3D interactive map of Pittsburgh with ambient sounds showing our favorite restaurants and little shops we love visiting when looking for reasons to get outside the Carnegie Mellon “bubble”.
For my final project I am creating a climate change related game. One project I found that was relevant to this is Solar Tapestry by Chloe Uden. Solar tapestry is an artful way of arranging solar panels in order to create an aesthetic and ecological form of energy. Chloe Uden describes this as “the Art and Energy collective re-imagines solar technology as an art material for the future.”
Another project that related to my final project is Starlit Stratus. Starlit Stratus, by Sunggi Park, is the first place winner of LAGI 2019 Abu Dhabi competition. It is a large-scale public art capable of producing clean energy. The canopy is made with inspired by origami. Sections of the triangular geometry are made from conventional rigid photovoltaic material to produce clean electricity during the day, while other sections are made from fabric that can easily fold and unfold. At night the light passes through these fabric geometries to create star-like patterns.
Both of these artworks use solar panels in creative and artistic ways to produce clean energy that is good for the environment. This aesthetic arrangement of clean energy use encourages more people to become more ecological.
The first precedent I found for my final project is Goodbye, Helios, an art piece by James R. Eads. The artwork is a digital piece drawn by Eads on a graphic tablet. It depicts the story of the relationship between two characters, Night, and Helios. Goodbye, Helios was one of the projects animated in a collaboration between Eads and Chris McDaniel (an animator known as “The Glitch”). I really enjoy the visuals used in the animations, from the bright, varied colors, to the smooth flowing movement of the lines. This is something that I would like to try and incorporate into my final project.
The second project I found as a precedent for my final project is Flame Painter, which is a painting software created by Escape Motions. It makes use of particle systems in order to allow the user to create incredibly dynamic and fluid brush strokes. The software is available to purchase for the use of different artistic professions, but for the purpose of this Looking Outwards, I interacted with the free demo. I enjoyed the way that the brush follows the mouse cursor, and the way that it almost rotates around the chosen spot. Even though the mouse is stagnant, the brush remains rotating and moving around the cursor. This creates an interesting interaction for the user to try to manipulate.
A screenshot of an short interaction on FlamePainter.
Both the projects below are sound visualization art projects and they intrigue me as transferring invisible elements to visible. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson and Thomas Huang of the Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction research theme led a collaboration that developed new computational methods for creating graphical visualizations of large audio files. The visualizations allow the user to scan an audio recording at 200 times that of real-time, enabling them to discover unexpected, or anomalous, events.
Using an analogy to items sometimes hidden in video games by manufacturers called “Easter eggs”, the researchers employed the term to refer to these unexpected events. Hasegawa-Johnson said the software is designed to free up the analyst by having the computer perform certain tasks, and render the data visually, such as with a spectrogram. The technology is able, for example, to analyze thousands of sound sources in an urban environment
The Cube: visualization of an audio dataset in the 3-D virtual environment Link: https://beckman.illinois.edu/news/2011/11/visualizingsound
News Feed is a data visualization and sound art installation that reads major worldwide online newspapers, exposing the sentiment of news stories published. As new articles are published from major journals, VADER algorithm analyses and classifies them according to whether they are positive or negative in sentiment. These results are then interpreted and transformed into sound and visual meanings, making the audiovisual installation to perform accordingly with the data.
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