Final design

Here is the final comic page! There are 20 frames and each of them is drew under my great consideration. I am not going to change anymore and continue next step - shooting bugs! (Unless I come up with a much much much nicer idea then the current set) After fixing the bugs in my code today, I will get the scenario video done very very soon! And I will be in good shape! Yeeeeeeeey! Go! Guy!

more pictures

more test shots. This layout will be totally redesigned. Hope I can catch the rehearsal on Sunday (shooting the scenario video)!

trial - almost done (hopefully)!

Here comes more screenshots for the Comic Exercise. And I still have these following missions left to be done in 3 days (by this week)! Seriously! And after 5/3, MPS degree is coming to me! Yeeeeeeeeey!

1. STORY! I know, I know! This has been bothering me for months! Now finally I got some ideas in mind and decided the ending of the story. (Weird, ending comes out first) Anyway, I have to start from the layout and put all my fragments together and turn them into a whole great masterpiece!

2. Scenario video! Obviously, there is neither room nor time to show my project in my presentation. The only and safest way is to do a scenario play. (Sort of fake it! Great!) I think I have to do rehearsal test as soon as I shoot the scenario. It may take a while to set everything up. Another issue is that it seems that all the rooms are occupied this weekend. Oh, such a worry... and I need to install Maxlink to the classroom's G5 since my laptop is so slow. Hopefuly, some admin can help me to install it.

3. Presentation slides/Documentaions. I have to add future ( potential) development into my powerpoint, and more references maybe?

4. Small bugs in Processing. The image needs to reverse.... a sound of sneeze has to be recorded.... And after all, do I have time to fix the pixel offset problem?

Start drawing my story RIGHT NOW!

Comic Exercise

Finally, my project's name comes out - "Comic Exercise"! It has been one and a half month since the midterm presentation. What am i doing in this period? Oh, everything goes so slowly.. First, I finished Networked Objects final as working with Greg for "Better Bin", which is an environmental issue project and totally not my style. As for my thesis, the main progress is the visual feedback of microphone input. I programmed dialogue bubbles which were generated by the volume of the sound. It's not (and will never be) perfect yet, and there are something much more important and emergent waiting for me...

The story - Gosh! I have been told that I have to concern most about my content for thousands of times! I knew it! But I just cant come up with very satisfying idea that totally intrigues me to run for it. I did a lot of research and took many references to find out something inspiring. Winsor McCay is a really influential comic artist and i swear after the thesis i will definitely go over his creations!

The design of the interface - My wish it to keep it simple. All interaction is supposed to be done in Processing + Max/Msp so that P-comp stuff is no need. My problem is, as JooYun said, how to make the player's action make sense? He is not just standing there and smiling embarrassingly toward the camera? I hope that the camera is hidden into the wall, which means, the projection wall will be drilled a small hole which allows the camera to peek from behind the screen. Another problem jumps out here: the light of projection will interfere with the camera's image capture since the camera is right facing the projector. The only solution I can think of is to hide the camera under a black (dark) field image, which is very likely a bug lens image (so that it can cover the drilled hole) to make the whole thing reasonable. That means I have to get a picture where and how to arrange a camera image in my story in advance. Maybe it's a good news since that's a direction for my content!

Go for it!

首先要抱怨一下馬得逼,firefox居然當掉還我整篇得重打,開個Menupages.com也會掛點?吼啊!

今天終於跟David Nolen小meet一下,遲來的兩個月meeting(總是在臨時飽佛腳嘛哈哈吼)!We talked about some projects, including his thesis project "Human Paper Interface" which was a sort of software to generate an animation from a piece of paper drawed frame-by-frame character's motions. The software can automatically pull out all shapes by finding their borders instead of traditional way of manually adjusting all character's postures paper by paper. Of course you can do that in Photoshop, but, we both agree that there is a means by which human can easily talk to computer by simply drawing. Ya, we are both drawing maniac. I also showed my ICM projects to David and he was especially interested in my ICM midterm project "Cyou." (BTW, I dont really like this name. It's supposed to be CartoonYou, CarYou something else anyway.) I said, all my projects were persuing a new way to experience comics, which is perhapes so called interactive comics. Anyway, the conclusion is, I should totally work on something I will continue on even after graduate. That's how he treated toward his thesis. I might re-think all my projects and get more ideas about the possiblilty of going any further. Think about the scenario, give the prject a story behind the scene and make it somehting much more than just an excitement, a typical ITP project!

Participating interaction part 2

Just saw a nice example of manual particapation of interaction: Tune 'n Radios. The radio works only after your drilling holes for speaker, choosing a antenna and attaching something on the volume and tune switches for full holding, by which the radio is totally set and customized. It's an ultimate DIY designer craft and everthing is supposed from your own everyday objects.

So, what exactly do I get inspired here? I think my excitement is that the user can totally set his own control panel, which is not just simply personally customized but is to attach the user's memory, habit and memory onto the object. The designer should leave some free space for the user on purpose, which I call unfinished design, of course meaningfully not practically. At a resonable level, the more participation the user is asked to do, the more sense of interactivity this design would convey.

I've been thinking about what I can do with drawing. What is the key element that exists in drawing behavior which is so common experience that nobody can miss it? Could it be some individual event having little to do with drawing itself? Or could be an acident during drawing? Or an opposite phenomenon to drawing? Erasing? Oh, there are too many things going on here. I have to keep writing, drawing, typing and thnking to make the ideas come out continuously.

Particapating interaction?

What the hell is "interaciton"? To get this question clear enough, here I have an extreme personal definition of interaction: unfinished design. A work is not complete yet without the user's full participation. "HIt it", for example, a chair design by Marign van der Poll and produced by Droog, is not a practicalbe chair until the user's final devotion: smashing it with a hammer, which comes with the chair, to determine his prospective form. The result is customized and potential to be kept changing along time. The video below shoes the process of accomplishing "Hit it":

To make things much simpler, let's say that those works which just wait there for people moving closer to operate some unfriednly interface without either narrative or emotional motive are not eligible for being called "interactive design". A successful interactive design should possess some features which can evoke participants' certain experience that make them react both emotionally and physically. From this point, an interaction designer cannot only focus on design itself. The background and research behind all human activities seem more and more important than the form of the design. It is the sequence of events that happen between users and objects that give the design meaning of interaction. It reminds me of an interesting news of RCA, the program Interaction Design just changed the name to "Design Interactions". It's not just reversing two words but indicates and pulls out the importance of interaction in design field which has been misunderstood for a while. Think about it.