Silhouette Showdown

One of the other papers I am taking for my Bachelor of Creative Technologies course is Simulated and Immersive Environments. Our main task is to create a game that pushes the notions of play and challenges the player by having them play on the edge. What this means is this game has to have some originality to it that allows the player to feel challenged in a way that is not common in most games today. It still has to be on the ethical side of things but can be outside the player's comfort zone.

My group are looking into making an interactive game using the player's body as the tool to play the game. The players will be asked to make certain shapes that will be displayed on screen and will have to try recreate the shapes only using their bodies. They will see their body on screen from a camera as being completely black on a white background. Once the timer is up the camera will take a screen shot and then compare it to the original shape and give them a score on how accurate they were.

Apples ad using silhouette dancers

It will involve quick decision making not just in how the player will solve the puzzles but also if they are wanting to participate in trying to solve it. This will be our way of pushing the player's boundaries and help change what type of thinking is involved in playing compared to the more typical games. There is this connection between players that is never really used a lot in most games today, players talk and see each other but always within their own comfortable space and most likely in front of a screen. What we encourage is to get into this comfortable space and use it as a way to get a different interaction between the players. One that will be more physical and interactive between players.

We haven't completely got the features concreted yet (teams, difficulty, types etc.) and will be focusing on the main parts involved. We are hoping to get the big problems out of the way early on so we can focus on the smaller details later. From past experience, especially with coding, I have always found it distracting and time consuming trying to make it all work at once. Following most from other programmers advice I am sure we will attempt this by breaking down each part and simplifying it for each team member to work on. We have assumed that MaxMSP will be the safest option to achieve how accurate the player is and determine their score, also we will look at using it for modifying the cameras output to make it look more silhouette like. If this is too difficult we still will look into other options.

References 

“DIY iPod Commercial Costume | Chai Life”, n.d. http://www.chailife.com/2009/09/diy-ipod-commercial-costume/.

Silhouette Animation, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCmxUlhw_GA&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

Silhouette Collisions Processing Demo, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOgX23plbfg&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

Silhouette Dance Group, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfh1fAFBdqI&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

Silhouette Replay Processing Demo, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dbtX1N19Qw&feature=youtube_gdata_player.