Almost There...

Our building is fully repaired and electrified...Stop by this weekend to see us installing, playtesting, and generally making downtown Pittsburgh the place to be.

Downtown Game Design

During Summer Sky Eternal's soft opening, we did a lot of people watching.  What did we learn?  For one, there's a lot competing for your attention when you walk down a city street: Traffic, pedestrians, businesses, smells, weather. Originally, we wanted Summer Sky Eternal to be passive, just like a painting in a window, something to give pause to the passerby.  We found that our peaceful approach doesn't work, we're being buried in the hum of downtown!

We also saw that kids love our installation, but expect it to work like an iPad.  When it doesn't deliver touch capabilities, they give up.

After some thinking, drinking, and the doodling above, we came up with some potential solutions.  We looked at using touch sensitive film, cell phone interaction, vibration sensors, and cameras, but in the end, we came up with a much simpler solution:

Using the sensors we already have in place, we came up with a fun puzzle game.  We'll scramble 3 pieces of art, then by walking up to the picture, you can rotate the pieces to see a nifty painting and some other fun things.  We'll call people over with super-nifty graphics and animation; it'll be a hoot!

Installation Madness

Getting Summer Sky Eternal up and running for Light Up Night was no easy feat.  We had to contend with collapsed walls, lack of electricity, broken doors, undelivered materials, and cold Pittsburgh weather.

That's all ok, though.  Our intrepid crew got the job done in style, as you can see in this classy video:

"Wait?!" you cry, "What happened to the winter/summer scene? All I saw was delightful bubbles."  That's true. We wanted to start with a simple prototype of an obvious interaction to see how people responded.  This soft opening has shown us that we're competing with the hustle and bustle of city life and need to do more to attract an audience...Stand by for fascinating discussions on game design!

We'll be going dark for a while to get a more reliable power source, and take another look at how we go about attracting people to play with our installation.  More updates as they happen, and we'll see you again for First Night 2012!

Materials

The world of rear projection materials is a fascinating place.  The basic concept for all of these materials is the same: add microscopic glass beads to a polymer to focus projector light.  We’ve looked at the three major contenders on the market:  3M, Prolight, and Acrylite.  Each of their products is great, but we need to figure out what’s best for our application.

3M makes Vicuity Rear Projection Film.  It’s the easiest to apply of all of the films, but also the most expensive.  Besides ease of installation, 3M boasts an extremely effective ambient light blocking layer to prevent extra light from the projector side of the screen washing out our image.  It’s great for uncontrolled lighting situations, but does cut down on the total brightness and saturation of the projected image.  Fortunately for us, we will be inhabiting a vacant building, so we have complete control of the lighting.  We don’t have to sacrifice the precious, precious brightness we need.

Prolight makes a variety of great budget priced films.  They are less than half the price of 3M’s, but don’t boast such powerful light blocking technology and aren’t as durable.  During installation I accidently scratched one of our samples really badly following the same basic installation techniques I’ve used for years working in the signage industry.  With some modifications I was able to safely apply the film, it’s color reproduction and clarity is great, and the variety of materials: dark gray, light gray, white and clear seems to cover any working conditions.  Our initial reaction was to mount Prolight’s dark gray on plexiglass.

Sadly for Prolight, we discovered Acrylite’s rear projection acrylic.  This is an 1/8^th inch acrylic sheet with glass beads disbursed throughout.  The surprising benefit of this material is that, because it has thickness, it diffuses the light slightly.  This blurs the image just enough to remove the projector’s dot pitch (the space inbetween pixels in a display) without making the image seem out of focus.  Since we’re simulating a painting, dot pitch is our enemy.  The price is slightly more expensive per square foot than mounting Prolight onto clear plexi.  We’re excited to move forward with it.

Project Approved!

Hurray! Our presentation to PopUp Pittsburgh’s board went well, they are going to give us a chance to entertain visitors downtown.  We’re negotiating budgets, soft opening dates and the like, but we’re excited to have Summer Sky Eternal in motion.

The Tech

So, how do we plan on creating this super-duper living painting experience?   Our basic tech setup will include:

-Arduino - the reigning champion of open source I/O processing, an Arduino Mega equipped with long range IR sensors will act as our user interface.

-Unity3D – We’re going with a 3d game engine to render all of our graphics with a brush-stroke-like custom shader.  Unity will take the output from the Arduino and use it to trigger transitions from winter to summer, fire animations, and correspond the painting’s lighting to the real time of day outside.

-Projectors – We want this painting to be visible at noon from across the street.  That means we’ll need a super bright light source.  We’re hoping that two 4,200 lumen projectors will do the trick on even the clearest of February afternoons.

-RearProjection Screen – We want the painting to be as close to viewers as possible, so we’re experimenting with different rear projection adhesive films that we can attach to our storefront’s windows.

-A Computer – No magic lanterns or gear-based analytical engines here.  We haven’t decided to go Mac or PC, but we’ll need a computer to hold the show together and also to connect to the internet so we can monitor the installation from afar.

The Concept

After a few intense meetings (intense because of the beers consumed, not conversations had), we’ve come up with some goals and a concept for our Pop Up installation.  We’re striving for an interactive experience that brings together families, friends and strangers to play together in downtown Pittsburgh.  What we’re proposing is a painting of a winter landscape.  As people walk in front of the painting, a portion transforms into summer. The more people, or the more one person moves, the more summer is revealed.  The painting should be on display during the depths of the horrible Pittsburgh winter so that hopefully, between the summer graphics, and running along or working with friends to try to trigger the entire painting, users feel warmer!

What?! Sorcery you say? Nay, it’s simply technology combined with good experience design principles.  Here’s how we explained it to Pop Up Pittsburgh:

“Summer Sky Eternal is a rear-projected image displayed on a storefront window with a large gold frame on the outside.  Viewers break inferred beams to trigger the computer generated image’s change to summer in real time.”

The Most Wonderful Project of the Year

Welcome To Summer Sky Eternal!  We’re a team of graduates from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center working with the Downtown Pittsburgh Partnership to create an awesome interactive art installation for PopUp Pittsburgh.  Stand by for all of the news, pictures, code, schematics, and art required to turn an abandoned storefront into a work of art.