This week, Studio Mar gave our midsemester progress presentation! We demonstrated our game, which now has the rest of the main features, including changing brush width, color, and texture. We also presented and discussed our research on word prompts, as well as our progress on marker prototypes, including a new, high-quality palette marker prototype.

Progress Presentation

In our progress presentation, we summed up all of the work and research up to this point, including a storyboard visualization of how to play LineAR and some explanation of how markers and UI for augmented reality works. Most of our progress for this week can be found in the presentation slides, which you can find in full here. Some of the highlights from the presentation are included above.

Tech update

On the technology and programming front, we’ve added all of our main features to the game, including all the brush options (width, color, and texture). While not all the features are accessible through a handheld controller, they can be changed through keyboard shortcuts. Marisa also created a handheld palette by laser cutting a disc with a pattern that the game recognizes as a 2D marker. In-game, a basic interface element of a paint blob appears over the marker that lets the player change the brush color by touching the paintbrush marker to the palette marker. In addition, the game now reads in word prompts from a text file and displays them on the handheld palette.

In summary, the game now includes:

• Drawing a line in 3D space
• Multiple people viewing the same drawing
• Changing brush color, width, texture
• Word prompts appear on palette
  

  Concept of the “artist” player, with palette and phone-controller paintbrush.

We also created and tested several new origin markers, including a large 3D cuboid marker. While Vuforia can track our prototype cuboid well, it’s still a little buggy to use as an origin, and we’ll have to keep testing markers to find one that will work for our installation. On top of that, we discovered that neither Daydream nor Bluetooth controllers work with Vuforia, so we need to find another workaround for the paintbrush controller. Right now, we’re planning on developing an interface to run on another phone (as part of the same app) to use as the paintbrush controller, with the paintbrush marker mounted on top.

Art + Design Update

In addition to the illustrations used in the presentation, our artists have been working on the UI, both physical and virtual. The physical and virtual design of the palette are synced together (seen at left). We’ve also been designing interaction concepts and features to include for the palette, beyond just displaying color options and the word prompt (as seen below). Unfortunately, because we’re still struggling to find a working paintbrush controller, we haven’t been able to really start work on the paintbrush UI, but we’re going to do our best to complete the basic UI elements in the upcoming week.

Word Prompts

We are going to send out a second survey based on our hypotheses about what makes a “good” word prompt. Hopefully the results from this survey, which will be formatted much like the previous one, will confirm our list of characteristics of what is an inherently creative prompt to draw and act in 3D space.

Production Schedule UPdate

As part of our presentation, we presented a revised production schedule based on our current progress. The main changes are summed up below:

• Less focus on artistic/experimental aspects (controversial word prompts)
• Dropped extended goals (gallery, re-animation)
• Focus on getting the core mechanics to work (doesn’t have to look too pretty)

Week 12 / Apr 06	Progress presentation due	Main features integrated
Week 13 / Apr 13	UI + Markers Multiplayer fixed Paintbrush controller	Virtual UI assets (paintbrush, palette) Origin marker prototype (not skull) Fix turn taking Phone controller for paintbrush Word prompt survey Round 2 results
Week 14 / Apr 20	Carnival	Playable game for playtesting Finish paintbrush controller!! Word bank for playing Virtual UI in game
Week 15 / Apr 27	Stable release	Pre-final: No new features to be added, bug squashing
Week 16 / May 04	Final presentation due	Flex week, presentation/final release prep

 

Thanks for reading this week’s update, and check back next week for more Studio Mar!