IMD Project 1:
AR Perspectives and Narrative
We often point at things to direct attention to them. The way we point can be a narrative, a joke, a novel. A picture is worth a thousand words because it covers more territory, can give more immediate perspective. Novel’s are at least 50,000 words, arguable whether less is more in that case.
AR gives a unique framing opportunity, particularly AR on phones. We see a picture, but the picture framed not by the director, but by the viewer. Or the steadiness of the viewer’s hand.
Perhaps even the viewer’s attention span.
When we make digital art we set the camera/frame and we can place objects outside it. Often, it’s up to us to pan a camera or viewport towards the next narrative beat or object of interest. With AR we have to convince the user to do it. Just like a novelist has to convince the reader to turn the page.
I wanted to play with this idea a bit this week. My original script was a bit too hard for me to handle, so I settled on something simple and direct.
A man feeling rejected, in despair, facing falling snow. The snow falling as we click on the AERO behavior is generated off camera, above the screen. Just above the visibility of the camera, is a salt shaker the user is effectively shaking on the despairing man.
Can we tell a full story like that? What would an ending that meant something look like? What would it feel like?
Anyway, I started with a basic Makehuman character. fat with a fedora, in all white on purpose. I ended up with a large and in charge 100% caucasian old man because my original character was Santa Clause. The beard and hat were beyond me.
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/fedora-man-1-9d13cfbd0fc94e6a800142e3db56a98d
I then opened a cinema 4d file and generated a plane. Above the plane I made a sphere, turned it white and shrunk it. I then made copy’s of the sphere on the y and x axis, and made all those spheres children of the original. I then copied the entire set on the z axis 8 times and gave them each separate animation keyframes moving back and fourth on the x axis, and down slowly on the y.
The idea was that each time the user activates the behavior, the user would cause more snow to fall for the duration of the animation. This was a bit complex, so I simplified the animation to simply falling down like salt does.
Then I made a salt shaker, and linked that to the animation. The salt shaker moves up and down, when the salt shaker reaches the bottom of the shake, the snow/salt falls. It’s also off camera, so the entire experience is structured like a joke on/with the user. I also animated the salt shaker and the falling salt at different framerates, for fun.
I had some trouble uploading this particular fbx file and getting it to work with unity, so I converted the file with this program:
And it worked fine. Some texture loss was inevitable, however.
The entire thing currently only works if one user sets it up and shows it to another person, but the phone handoff doesn’t quite keep the secret at the moment. Not really sure how to solve that problem with Aero currently.
That being said, there’s an interesting space here, somewhere in between a mobile art installation and a movie. I’d love to explore it further.
