Category: SectionC

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.

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

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.

Project Priors and Precursors

The first artist I researched was Greg Borenstein. Greg Borenstein is a game designer, technologist, and teacher. His work explores game design, computer vision, drawing, machine learning, and generative storytelling as media for play and design. His game “Sneak” is a hybrid digital-physical tabletop game that began as his thesis in the MIT Media Lab Playful Systems group. It attempts to combine the social richness of a boardgame with the systemic complexity of a video game. This is relevant to my final project because I also would like to make an interactive game.

The second work I looked at was Moritz Stefaner’s “GROW Soil Moisture Maps.” The GROW Observatory is a European-wide project engaging thousands of growers, scientists and others passionate about the land. They developed the Dynamic Soil Moisture Map as a demonstration of an information service which could be used by farmers, scientists and policy makers for applications in agriculture and climate forecasting. These maps use GROW sensor data combined with satellite data to generate a continuous estimation of water content over a terrain. I admire how they look at real world data. This relates to my final project because it is also about the environment and the wellbeing of the earth.

It’s final project time! When I read the prompt for the final project, I immediately knew I wanted to do something related to a game. As referenced in my last 2 Looking Outwards, I love video games and I think it would be really cool to try and build a game experience through p5.js. A game that came to mind was Frogger, a classic concept where a character must cross a road with incoming traffic to reach the other side. For this Looking Outwards, I looked at two examples of Frogger-style games: the classic Frogger on the C64, and Crossy Road on the iPhone.

The original Frogger is a clear flash-to-the-past, with insanely retro graphics and color schemes. Frogger was released in 1981 by Konami, and it was an instant hit; players loved the simplicity of the game as well as its addictive appeal. The premise is straightforward: the player, playing as a frog, must weave through traffic and jump across a variety of animal-backs and logs to reach safety on the other side of the screen. The player then goes through a series of levels to try and set their high score without losing all of their lives. Frogger’s simplicity was part of its charm, but I personally felt their was a level of animated complexity lacking; of course, this was likely because of the datedness of the game (1981 was a while ago, and computers have come a long way since!).

Crossy Road, released in 2014 by the gaming studio Hipster Whale, is an attempt to fix this issue by adding in flashy new graphics, fun animations, and 3D characters. It’s modeled with block/pixel-style characters, seemingly a reference to the game’s historical roots, but it’s clear after playing Crossy Road that gameplay is immensely smoother and more flowy. I’ve played Crossy Road in the past, and it was a great experience. The game was fun, and losing doesn’t even feel bad because of the charm of the game. However, one thing I felt could be improved on is the simplicity of the game; in a weird way, Crossy Road almost does too much to the original frogger to the point where the various rocks, trees, cars, and rivers the player needs to avoid become almost distracting. There’s something sophisticatedly simple about the original Frogger that reduces gameplay distractions, and that’s something I think Crossy Road misses at times.