Final

This term was a brutal struggle but was filled with many unexpected surprises. For starters.......I was on oxygen for a month so my project and schoolwork came to a crashing halt. This put a lot of time off to the side but I had no choice but to just lay in bed and recover. Aside from being sick I was a CA (Conference Associate) at GDC (Game Developers Conference) for a week. It was the best thing I could have EVER done to propel my career into the video game industry. I was offered 2 jobs while I was there and it boosted my confidence. A few companies even told me that this project could even get me hired when I completed it. (WHAT?!?!? HOW COOL!!)

Not only were those set backs....But David Bithell and I (without him I would have stopped working on this project) restarted the programming over three times. Why? Each time it wasn't doing what we needed it to do or it wasn't working properly. We had to go back to the drawing board many times and start at square one.

Everything has not been lost though! Last week David and I met once again and we came up with a better solution. Have a screen capture of the animata program with two shadows being available while using MAX MSP with patches. What patches? Well, as seen below I will record my own movements that will be what the shadows will do when they're not following the viewers movements. It will smoothly transition from my own video recordings to the live view of the viewers actions.

Program: Transition Video

Screen Capturing Animata

Another piece of the puzzle is getting the information from the kinect and transferring it to the models. This will be done by a patch that recognizes joints on a person so you can add it to a model. This live data will be used to move the shadows with the viewers movements.

Kinect Data Patch

Example of a shadow

With the smooth transition between the viewer and shadows movements I decided to add instrumental music to my piece. I decided this because I wanted to add depth and better a better system to communicate with the viewer as to when they have control and lose it. I met a composer at GDC that I grew close to and he's more than willing to do the music for me. If you would like to hear his amazing music go to http://soundcloud.com/athakkar

This term didn't go to plan but it wasn't a waste by any means. I actually have a plan for the programming now. It may not be 100% done but at least I figured it out after all the trials and errors. I wasn't close to my goal of being done with the programming but I feel like I'm at 65% which is better than 0. I did what I could do with the cards I was dealt and programming with a new technology is no easy task.