Output?

I was casually talking to Craig about this project today and he suggested an interesting output for my group's project involving a fan and some miniature balloons. When the user is interacting with the input, the mother robot is sucking up the balloons in the scene, which then triggers the output involving a fan which blows out miniature balloons into the physical world. I thought this idea was pretty clever so I pitched it to my group and they seem pretty keen on working with this idea. We might work on this extra detail if we have the time.

Environment.

Environment with some subtle animations.

Images:

Basic environment in development...


With the robots in the space (Comparing art styles)

WIP.

Faylin's sketches:



My work in progress for the environment...

Reassigning.

The roles have slightly changed to spread the workload and personal abilities as evenly as possible. As Faylin does not feel very confident in using Illustrator or doing little animations, her environment role has been taken over by me and she has gone back to helping Steven put the input interaction together. We are keeping her sketches for the environment and I will redraw them in Illustrator while she tests out the interaction part by test coding it in Arduino. Jisook is going to start animating the robots and David has yet to start with the coding aspect of the project.

Instances.

Robot animation cycles:

Mother
Idle - feather duster
Angry
Vacuum - arm turns into vacuum and sucks up balloons.

Child
Idle - Happy
Blowing balloons
Sad for a few seconds after balloons are sucked up.

Animation.

Started doing some animation tests for the balloon characters today....

This is their stationary movement and their movement around the room would be coded.

Development.

As a group, we are always talking about different ways to develop this project and after each class, our ideas are always different to the last... However, we seemed to have refined our ideas after the latest meeting and things seem to be less blurry now.

Building upon our previous idea, we have decided to have 2 robots in the scene(mother and child). The mother bot is strict and likes to keep things organised and bland. She likes her mechanical robot life and doesn't like foreign objects. The child is quite the opposite and likes to play with new things. In the scene, the child fills the room with brightly coloured balloons but the mother disapproves of them as they are 'foreign objects' in the robot world, therefore cleans them up with a vacuum cleaner.

The user interacts with this scene by means of a 'controller' which charges up the vacuum cleaner that the mother uses. When the user interacts with the controller, the mother vacuums up the balloons, cleaning up the scene.

Assigned roles:
Me and Jisook: Character development and animation (robots and balloons)
Faylin: Environment and Input interaction
David: Coding
Steven: Input interaction

Variation.

Designed some more balloons that the child robot would fill the room with...



I thought it would be more interesting to have more than just balloon animals.

Concepts.

Some concepts for the balloon animals that would float around the environment.

Balloons.

Had another group meeting in class today, minus Jisook because she is sick, but we still made progress in terms of dividing out the responsibilities.

We have also come to an agreement as a group to create a mechanical and rigid looking environment with a cleaning bot living in it and users 'pollute' the environment by blowing animal balloons into it. The form and bright colours of the balloons are considered as a foreign and unknown object to the cleaning bot, so it aims to destroy it to keep the environment 'clean.'

Brainstorming.

Today in class, my group was just talking through our project idea. We talked about having an environment such as a park where it would look completely normal until the user disturbs it by "playing god" and messing it up with natural disasters like tornadoes and earthquakes. After the disturbance, objects within the environment would become alive and clean up the mess.

For next class, each of us are going to do some sketches of what the environment could look like.