We showed Brad Gallagher the current state of our project, which currently consists of only animations and sound, in the Black Box again on Wednesday, March 15th. Brad was very pleased with the progress we’d made and appreciative of the kinds of interactions our work would encourage. As we tested these out, we realized that if we wanted our project to work the way we initially planned, we would either have to switch our animations over to Unity (a software none of us are familiar with), or otherwise create perhaps hundreds of animations to accommodate every scenario. For example, if the user first decides to make a plant grow and later decides to make it multiply, there would need to be a scene where the featured plant is already enlarged while the other plants appear. If the user then decides to grow the plant some more, there would have to be yet another scene created. In this kind of experience, where the results of each interaction are maintained, there are countless different paths the user could take. Furthermore, because we envision more than one user at a time interacting with the installation, they could attempt to perform multiple interactions at once, making the animation options even more complicated. Brad offered us an elegant solution to this dilemma: reverse the effects of the animation after they are performed. This way, the results of the interactions would not need to be remembered and compounded over time.
As far as displaying multiple interactions at once goes, the projection software Resolume enables overlaying with multiple videos, so we would only need to adjust the opacities of the videos in order to show both interaction animations. With these changes, we were able to bring the number of animations needed down from possibly hundreds to less than 20. One final suggestion that Brad made was to reduce the number of plants from 4 to 3, reason being that the best camera for documentation in the Black Box is located behind one of the projection screens. If we used all four walls, the camera would be blocked. We agreed that documentation in this case was more important than creating a full-circle world, and anyways construction of the physical plants was already behind schedule. This reduced the workload and improved our documentation prospects. Overall, it was a very productive and helpful meeting.
NOTES ON GROWING 