Narrative in Augmented Reality Fall 2017: Shivanku Kumar

Final Presentation

https://docs.google.com/a/nyu.edu/presentation/d/1BatzcZQi1dBwylP97_ql1swTXSLXcwhzYjnJZqO2_Xs/edit?usp=sharing

The idea for the final was to create a concert in AR for street musicians.

What worked:
I was able to get the audio from mic input and extract the spectrum data from it. And then triggering the orbs and change their properties based on that data.

Scope for future work:
There are certain technical difficulties in working with AR and live music, such as how do we filter out noise and just visualize the music, how do we understand the kind of music being played and trigger the appropriate visuals, how do we map the space so that the augment maps and scales accordingly.

Assignment4: Mid-term presentation

We switched our idea to something more connected to the game center. Here is the revised idea:

The Setting

The NYU Game Center, as its name suggests, is a place where people have made many games, each one the result of countless work hours, merge conflicts, and discarded lines of code.

But for every game built to completion within these halls, there were several more that were scraped. More often than not we find that there are very interesting and enlightening stories behind these scrapped ideas. We wanted to create an AR experience that would bring these scrapped ideas and the stories behind them out in the open.

These stories of failure and experimentation can become motivation to students who are struggling to bring their own ideas to life. The Game Center then becomes a place where failure is something to be proud of, to be shared and to not be hidden away.

With gamecenter/scraps, formerly junked ideas of game design MFAs can live on as
(1) cautionary tales, or
(2) interesting experiments
in themselves that future students may take inspiration from. Students need only go to the very place these ideas were discarded. As more students come and go, future rejections can be added to the heap.

Video Documentation

Presentation Link
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kjXvTYWhGajY8LFNrjj_dac285tqE-Gj9j58jQY9l-Y/edit#slide=id.g25aa197921_0_0

Assignment3: Mid-term project pitch

For this project, I am working with Paolo. Here is the link to the pitch deck:

https://docs.google.com/a/nyu.edu/presentation/d/14Lzw9chfPCxdAz52fuUerkZK_fUUU8fGzpo7UU4wGdo/edit?usp=sharing

After going through several ideas, we decided to augment the Metrotech Commons area, a place where people often sit and relax, and turn it into a place where you can get attacked by malevolent forest spirits.

Metrotech Commons

The concept of forest spirits was partially inspired by the "diwata" of Philippine mythology. They are forest spirits or goddesses that are generally depicted as benevolent, unless they are provoked.

Artist's rendition of a diwata

Our version of the forest spirit

In our version, Pao and I wanted to depict a darker, more evil version of these spirits. By upending the legend of these normally peaceful "diwata," we also aim to upend the peace and idyll of a public park--but only for those who know the mark:

Scanning the mark with an "enchanted slate" will peel away the fabric of our reality and reveal the forest spirits roaming the area.

Enchanted slates not only have the power to reveal these spirits, but also capture them. Doing so requires skill and timing. As they charge to attack you, catch them by blocking their flight path with your slate. They will not be able to escape.

You can learn more about these captured spirits by consulting your slate.

Assignment 2: Indexical Storytelling

I couldn't remember a movie scene that used space effectively to tell a story but one experience that stuck out with me was a visit to the Tenement Museum.

They have an interesting approach of showing history. Its a museum about regular people and their struggles in history and the way they do it is by recreating to scale the spaces in which these people lived. So as a visitor to the museum you are listening to someone's life while inside their house, as it was when they lived in it. Its quite an experience and I feel although you have a guide to tell you a story, it is the space that does most of the storytelling.

Assignment 1: BlipAR

I started by thinking what is unique abut storytelling in AR. I felt like its strong connection to reality is really interesting, something that is unlike any other medium. It invites you to explore the world around you instead of cutting you off from it. So I got interested in strictly offline activities, something that you can only do in the physical world, one such activity is going to a museum and looking at an original art piece. Eating food was another important one but I chose to go with museum. I love the "Ugolino and his sons" piece at the Met museum but like any other art piece it makes more sense when you know the story behind it. Unfortunately the museum still charges for the headphones they give out, which is really weird in this day when so much quality information is freely available. I think with some simple image recognition and AR all this freely available information on the internet can be contextualized. I wanted to create a demo of how it might look and what kind of information can be pulled in to augment the experience.

Here is the marker that I started with:

I used BlipAR to superimpose an audio that I downloaded from youtube and a link to google art project with the backstory of the sculpture. I also thought with some permissions we can pull in pictures from social feed of the users and contextualize the pictures their friends posted in front of the sculpture.

Here is how it looked in BlipAR