Description

Quilt-making is a traditionally community-oriented craft, from Kit’s friends on the American frontier to Stefani Danes + Doug Cooper’s quilt/mural collaboration. Given the current pandemic, our group decided to focus on one question: how do we leverage advances in technology to keep our communities creating together? 

We chose to design a game that would lean into our current social situation. Targeting people with little to no experience in quilting, we chose to develop a program using Spark AR that would guide users through developing individual quilt squares. This guidance will come in the form of an animated grandmother who will teach you to create a summoning square for the Almighty Super Evil Grandma.

Through object recognition, she will be able to tell how much of the pattern you have finished, and guide you to the next step. When each square is complete, all quilters must come together (after the pandemic) and finish the quilt to summon the super grandma. Individual squares will determine a certain aspect of the end animation. Although each quilt will follow a selected pattern, each of these squares can be customized with various fabric textures and colors, and can change super grandma’s appearance and character.

(Learn a new hobby, have fun with your friends, respect your grandmothers, kind of?)

Workflow Diagram

Collaborative Roles

• Tim will focus on most of the software development with regards to object recognition, organizing the assets, and triggering certain events.
• Ophelie will focus on developing the quilt templates and some of the assets/animations.
• Elizabeth will focus on creating the instructions and some of the assets/animations.

Individual Fabrication Methods

Each individual participant may follow a downloadable pattern and aurally dictated instructions to hand sew a simple individual tile. There is some flexibility in that the participant may choose which preset pattern they would like to use, and they may choose what colors they prefer to determine the end result.

Critical Physical Resources

All participants will require access to scrap fabric and basic hand sewing supplies. They will also need to have Instagram and/or Facebook downloaded on a mobile cellular device in order to access the AR content.

We the project team, in addition to the resources above, also require a computer that can run the Spark AR program suite and Blender to create the instructions and the relevant assets.