GMU:Keeping Track/Final project

Jörg Brinkmann

Little Grandmother Keisha Crowther Simulation

How?

I took some audio from this video:

I used Pure Data, Arduino and a servo motor to do this:

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Henning, Frederic und Moritz

CUBECITY

As a final task for the Keeping Track course we designed a 3D Jump 'n' Run game that can be played only by the player's movement in front of a camera.

JUMP
'N'
RUN

Story

The Ego-Runner has to make it through a 3D-world. It is a tunnel made with squares that come closer and closer. Easy. BUT: The player is not (!) allowed to touch the small and big barriers which are spread everywhere. He/she has to jump above hurdles, step aside walls and pillars or crouch down gates and balks. The game is won, when the player has reached the end of the world without touching any cube of CUBECITY.

How it works

CUBECITY is a highly interactive and immersive Jump 'n' Run game written in Processing 1.2.1. It works with a videotracking system based on the EyeCon software. EyeCon catches the bottom/top and the left/right edge of the playing person. The data of the resulting cuboid is sent to Processing via network (OSC protocol). In Processing the edges of the cuboid define the outlines of the player's avatar. The data of the cuboid will be compared with the momentarily rendered row of squares an cubes in the 3D-world. If there is a cube and the edges of the avatar are crossing it's edges the program will be stopped and the game is over.

Style

CROUCH DOWN!
JUMP HIGH!
GAME OVER!

The look and feel of the game is based on the first console games of the early 90s. Pixeltype, 8bit soundtrack and reduced graphic- and colordesign combined with todays possibilities of interactive game control give us the ability to assume the role of the heroes of our past/childhood/youth!

And!

Of course there is a HIGHSCORE, waiting for you to be bet. Do you have the power and bravery to jump through CUBECITY...?

Time and place of the first CUBECITY Championship will be announced soon!

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Media: CUBECITY.zip

Ana und Marianne

1000 words

The world is turning like our thoughts – and we are the audience, watching their change

We were building a miniature world with an engine that would make the world turning around its own axis. As soon as it was finished and we saw the rotating world we constructed an image in our minds, sitting around a table with the world on it. Also we wanted to use some recordings of foreign languages as the sounds, which can be triggered in the motion tracking system.

We are using the motion tracking area as synonym of the Tower of Babel where a united humanity speak a single language, build one alliance and create a place of perfection and then be separated by God who confused their languages. The language is the main symbol for us on one hand as a border between peoples and on the other hand as a rich element of each culture. Our Project is a filmed performance in which the participants are able to activate the motion tracking system with their hands and other elements like paper, plastic, markers, strings etc. In the performance we are playing with our imagination and emotions affected by the different languages we are hearing. We are creating a collage of one cultural code.

Global Code Collage

After performing and watching recordings of us and some experiments we recognized the importance of our movements and our contribution to the untypical situation. Having this in mind, we were thinking about other possibilities. However it was primary to us to base our actions to the initial point and to stick with the rotating world and the recordings of the different languages. While being in the auditory environment we created a collage made out of different materials as an answer to the surrounding sound. The results were three or four rehearsals with individual collages, which show our impossibility of understanding, our atmosphere and mood we were experiencing in this moment. In the end, the collage appears like a message and a visual abstract of emotion in this common situation of not understanding foreign languages.

Software

We are working with the motion sensing software EyeCon, using the element line, which is set on different levels. We developed a choreography to trigger the lines through our performance. As soon as one line is triggered it disappears and EyeCon switches to the next level with a new line. To each line is a different language attached.

Liana

SundayTraffic

I always wondering why have so many people just spend some of their free times just sitting or just playing around Theaterplatz specially when the sun is shining. For me it's like the easiest meeting point in Weimar. I was wondering how many people usually pass thru Theaterplatz in one day ? And how many people take picture of Goethe and Schiller statue everyday ?

I was trying to track some people's movements around Theaterplatz on Sunday which is usually most of the people are going there on this day. I took the videos with my camera and then I just edited in Adobe After Effects. I also tried to track some people with different lines just to show the traffic.

camera
following some people's movements
soldiers in theaterplatz

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Katre Haav

GPS trackfilm

I got inspired from GPS tracking as I had a chance to test one GPS program made for Nokia telephones, where it is possible to save your tracks for sport. I made some tests for „drawing“ a track on a map with GPS, but that alone seemed too boring to use for assignment. So I decided to make things more interesting and animate the tracks for my final assignment. The princip of this animation is to walk around in the field drawing different tracks with GPS. Afterwards the tracks will be composited and made run after each other so animation is created. As I first was planning the tracks I had no idea, that they are so hard to realiise in reality. I started with complicated drawings, but soon I realized it was too much to make an understandable animtion. Thats why I chose to use easy recognisable symbols.

Workflow: Drawing a Storyboard Finding a good location. Going out to the location and mark basic markers on the ground. Running around „Drawing“ with GPS Uploading all the files in internet map. Going through every track one by one and saving them as pictures. Import pictures to After Effects and composite them, every picture after another so that an animation sequence is created. I had about 70 different tracks/drawings. Finally find a fitting music.

Difficulties: First of all, the biggest challenge was to start imaginig drawing in a bigger scale. Most of my shapes were more than 150 m long. In such a distance it is quite hard to remember exactly where did you draw the line before in order to know what follows next. Allinall it is hard to imagine and realise drawings in such a scale. Sometimes I had problems with the GPS signal, occasionally it didn't save the tracks, so I had to do some tracks again or later repair them manually in webpage.

storyboard/sketch
GPS-Cellphone
running with GPS
compositing the tracks

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