Craig Dennis

Day Two @ Rave On Air 2008

Please click the images to view the full set in Flickr.

Day One @ Rave On Air

User testing with large groups of people was very interesting today.

It was a ‘live’ environment so there was the ‘Virtual Earthquake’ going off in the background and the ‘Red Carpet’ crowd cheering loudly, all of which meant it was difficult for people to understand Shoutbox as their shapes were quickly overridden with the ambient sound pollution.

When the room was quiet though and a small group of people came in, it was easy to see them enjoying Shoutbox. Once the simple explanation was given they tried it out for themselves and created shapes. Some even had competitions to see who could create the largest shape or the fastest shape.

Even when there were no groups in the room you could see members of the Interaction course playing with it. Tom was playing a piece of wood like he would his bongos to create a series of shapes that were in time and also played back the same noise. He said “it would be great for VJs”.

The only problem with it is one that was expected and that is running it from my laptop. We have perfectly good G5 quad core Macs in iLab but we can’t use those, instead we were stuck with some old G4s that had no microphone input, the MaxMSP trial had expired on some of them and some had an administrator password that nobody in the entire faculty knew.

For the delegates tomorrow the flash .swf file will need resetting after every group so that it is a smooth as possible. Even though the shapes are deleted after a new one is created, where there is a very loud consistent noise (like from either of the other two sound based installations) the collision detection struggles on the relatively poor performance of my laptop.

Here are some pictures of today. Click to view the whole set in Flickr.

Setup / User Testing @ Rave On Air

The setup for Rave On Air should have been very smooth today as the RC1 was prepared so all we had to do was boot up a computer, install the plugins and away… right? How wrong that is. After many problems with Macs, PC’s, connectors and lack of microphone input on G4s I finally booted up my laptop and it was running on that all day.

The good thing is we were able to watch people use the ShoutBox without saying “Do you want to try it out”. All day people were shouting out at the screen… sometimes there was a lull and only a few small balls were generated from ambient sounds, sometimes interference from other installations would generate too many large balls too quickly and crash the Max application, and sometimes people would re-engage with the installation and generate sounds. This would carry on for a surprisingly long time as louder sounds would be heard more and become more interesting to more people.

Here are a few images of the setup process. Click the images to view the full set in Flickr

Rave On Air [ALMOST] Completed

Finally everything to do with the Rave On Air website is finished. Sponsors logos are all in place, curved boxes are all…. curved, and the colours are odd but thats what the ‘client’ wanted so thats what I’ve done.

Have a look here

Have a look at the current site at www.raveonair.com

[Edit]

I spoke too soon… already there is ‘more content’ to go up and problems that don’t exists and yet they are there. So frustrating.

We Have No ‘Fete’ But What We Make… Judgement Day: 5th June 2008

The next project has started and it looks to be a very interesting one, with the emphasis on a village fete style environment with many ‘booths’ (or interactive experiences in this case) that will bring the community together to raise money for the proverbial church roof.

Currently the mindmapping (formerly brainstorming) is in progress and ideas are flowing freely. These have been documented on the back of the brief but will be filled out further as the week goes on. Initially ideas were conforming to the norm of the village fete as the brief did not express the areas into which we could explore.

Here is a list of ideas that have been initially individually thought up with that in mind:

Wii Splat The Rat
Gesturing a bat swipe at a projection of the game

Wii Coconut Shy
Gesturing a ball throw at a projection of a coconut shy. As participants can’t take a virtual coconut home if they knowck one down… one will be emailed to them.

Guess the Pixels
People are given the option to guess the number of pixels in a shape on a projection (instead of jelly-beans in a jar).

Wii Tug of War
Participants use a projection mimicking their movements to move a rope

Wii Gladiators
Participants use a projection mimicking their movements to battle each other.

However after an insightful discussion, the type of ‘booth’ veered away from the traditional village fete and more towards lots of interactive experiences that would bring people together in a fete-like environment. Giving the same sense of community and also providing the same ‘pay-per-go’ attributes that would enable the restoration of the proverbial church roof.

Here is a list of ideas that stem from that discussion:

A Visual Shout Box
People make a noise that is then depicted on a projection / wall. The louder the noise the more ‘angry’ the image / animation or the more it does something. There is the possibility for many more shapes to be added by using (for example) the tone of the voice. These can then be printed or emailed to participants as a souvenir of their experience.

A Disobedient Shadow
A camera tracks the movement of a person against a wall (back projected screen) and creates a shadow them. The shadow then appears to disregard it’s own nature and take on personality indipintant from that of it’s host. The shadow could simply stop, or turn around or get angry at the fact it is always copying someone. At this point it is unclear how realistic the shadow would be or how the participant’s existing shadow would be neutralised. This is interesting because if the shadow suddenly started doing it’s own thing, would the host find themselves following their shadow?

Other more general ideas include participants being unaware of what is going on but other people can see the result of their interaction with the ‘booth’ or participants thinking they are involved in a predefined experience but in fact they are reacting to each other and THAT is the experience.

This project has a lot of potential with thing like movement tracking, gestures, unusual input, unusual responses and even expected results but an unexpected way of receiving them.

Based on feedback from Flo on previous projects this post is an attempt to write project related articles in more of a formal, third person style.

New Rave On Air

Today I got a message from Danille Leben from Rave On Air askin me if I had received the email about the new branding. I hadn’t but I had. It was in my spam folder. Anyway the new ‘branded’ site is online but I’m not convinced by it. There were a few ‘must-have’ things they said needed to be put on the website… which made it harder to cut up their template. The theme had to rotate every time someone went to the site, so there was a different colour each time, easy to do – bit of javascript and several css files.

The problem was the headings HAD to be in Century Gothic font, meaning they had to be images, meaning I had to cut each heading out and create a div just for it so I could have it as the background of the div and rotate it with the stylesheet. This was made infinitely more complex as the templates I had been sent were all different sizes and alignments but obviously meant to be the same thing.

Anyway… after many hours of slaving away over Illustrator and photoshop the site is now re-branded. It does rotate the themes randomly when you hit refresh but doesn’t always work if you try to do it too often. I just grabbed the first javascript file I found.

Have a look here

Have a look at the current site www.raveonair.com

Rave On Air Progress

I’m working on the Rave On Air 08 holding page at the moment using html, css and php. I think I’m getting the hang of all the web malarkey now… It’s a work in progress and is subject to change what with the creative side of it being kinda taken away from me.

In Feb or April the theme will have been decided on and I will have to make the whole site, and make the whole site match the theme. Anywho, it’s currently hosted on my own site until the dispute with the RaveOnAir domain name is resolved so check it out…

UPDATED 04/03/08 – Domain issues resolved

Have a look here

Have a look at the current site at www.raveonair.com

Rave On Air 2008

I have just finished a quick template of a holder page for Rave On Air 2008. There is no branding for it yet and I don’t expect there will be for a few months yet so I was instructed to use the Ravensbourne colour scheme. Let me know what you think.