Project: Music Interface (AV Instrument Building)

Team: Kevin Bartushak, Justin Drum, Tammy Le

Tagline: Promoting personal interaction in an audio-visual space.

Problem: Design students in NC State’s ADN 460 course have developed an AV Instrument called
Elemental in which users’ motions are tracked and influence visual and audio responses in a
designated space. They have created four different themes (earth, water, fire, air) for the
AV Instrument. Without an external interface, Elemental’s themes and user settings can only be
altered by the computer on which it is running. In order to make Elemental more engaging for users,
we developed a mobile application which allows individual users to customize their blob color and
switch between the available themes.

How the app works: Using a tile-based layout, similar to Windows, we created a simple visual
interface for users of the space to interact in a more personal way. Our app is intended to be mounted
next to the visual display, allowing users of the space to change the parameters of the experience.
Currently, users can change the overall theme of the visual display, or they can change the individual
colors of each person. As users leave and enter the space, tiles are created and destroyed to
represent the number of current users. Tapping a tile reveals a dropdown panel with settings
corresponding to that tile.

Our design of the app heavily coincides with the visual goal of the design team, choosing to use visual
indicators over text menus. Because of this, there is no text in our app, only tiles and icons. We aimed
to create a visual interface that was clear in purpose and usable, but promoted curiosity and
interaction from the user. We believe that the colors and icons successfully accomplished this goal,
bringing an intuitive and visually-appealing experience to the users.

Unfinished and future work: When we initially designed the app, we planned to incorporate settings
for multiple aspects of Elemental, including the following: audio and visual settings for an individual
user, and the overall theme. We were unable to accomplish the audio settings due to unexpected
side tasks from the design team. These include being asked to help the design students with their
own code, explore Game of Life implementations, and connect Processing and React Native with
OSC. Additionally, because the design students frequently changed their vision for Elemental, many of
our initial design and functionality ideas had to evolve or change with theirs. We think the addition of
simple toggles would be useful for changing audio aspects such as volume and pitch, allowing users
to change their audio experience in addition to the visual experience. Now that we have established a
channel for communicating between our app and the other environments, these additions would be
simple to add in the future.

Link to Github repo here.

Link to Video here.

Project: Isometric Puzzle Game

Team Members:

Jacob Inkrote, Tony Mosolf, Jane Hiltz, Eilish Thomas, Deanna Jones, Emily Parker, and Zoe Winton

Tagline:

An isometric puzzle solving game where a cat fights to obtain their nine lives from the Egyptian gods

Core Problem/How it Works:

The game uses the isometric camera angle, which means that the camera is locked in place the entire time. This presents the problem of having to keep everything relevant to the player on the screen all the time and still including movement or larger levels. We accomplished this by using some visual trickery and quick thinking.

How it works:

The game works by using different types of interactive object and environments. They take in a certain user interaction and that causes the world to change in a prescribed way as a result. In order to work with the isometric view, we had objects move on and off the screen while having the player remain stationary to give the appearance that they were moving while they really weren’t. We also included a level with a rotation mechanic in order to show actual movement without having to change the camera’s position.

Unfinished and Future Work:

Due to time constraints we were only able to create 4/9 levels. In future work we would like to make the rest of the levels, implement a menu system, and include a story that will be given to players as they progress through the game

Links:

YouTube video

GitHub Repo

Wendy 2 (VR Project)

Members: 

Srujan Barai, Samuel Jessee(CS Students) Will James, Dylan Bryant, Tiffany Kangas (Design Students)

Description:

Play as Wendy—a young woman who always imagined herself as a witch. Cuddled up with your pet cat, you sit alone one Halloween night, drinking wine and eating candy—you find yourself falling asleep and into a dream.

You awake in a magical tower with the power of telekinesis—tinker and move objects by simply looking at them for a second or so. Tasked with brewing a potion, you must solve a series of puzzles, collecting ingredients and adding them to a cauldron.

The game is designed to be a comfortable experience: have fun at your own pace without a time constraint or sore neck.

Wendy is made in collaboration with Korigame—a talented game designer and an artist.

About the Game: 

With this project, our group aimed to find and develop new ways for players to interact with VR environments. We build on top of the open-source game called Wendy to design and develop new interactions for the VR game. In Wendy 2, players use only their gaze to interact with the environment and solve puzzles. The game was made with the game engine Unity.

Future Work:

· Expand the environment and add even more interactions.

· Add additional methods of interaction via hand controllers.

· Improve and tweak animations and assets.

Links:

GitHub Link: The project has files that exceed 50 MB in size and hence gets rejected by Github.com and therefore this project cannot be made available on Github (Example file: Knife/MetalSpottyDiscoloration).

Instead, the code can be found here. 

Video Link (Lower graphics quality to allow recording on regular PC. On Oculus, it plays very well)