Projects 2014 > Teleportation Tent > Journal
Mon 2 Feb, 2015
In the last few workshops we had with our young coaches a theme has started to emerge. Colouring pencils are a win.
In thinking about narrative and user experience we have been working out ways in which the design of the tent can guide the children to a particular range of states.
In the earlier testing sessions we observed a kind of frenetic tech binge when children first encountered the interface.
After constructing the tent, children produce the animated state of the interior of the tent by using a series of small figurines representing different characters and worlds that they could visit. For starters we had the fox, the skull and the cake, visiting mars, the forest or underworld.
Each character when placed on the Stage would come to life by triggering new projections to play on the walls. What we observed was that at the start of the testing period of the interface all each child wanted to do was put on and remove each character and background one at a time and change them around again. There wasn't quite the appetite in the children using this set up to create the stage around them using a mixture of characters to trigger a collage of projections and then sit back and watch. It was all mad dogs and Englishmen, in a way it was a consumptive approach to the tech. A "what does it do" rather than a "what can I do with it". We have had a few ideas which are not ready about creating a calmer state through animations that develop over time. This includes scripting the animation so that it is always nighttime in the place that you begin, or you can see the trees flower if you have the patience to be rewarded with it. This works really successfully in Minecraft (creative rather than battle mode) where you are forced to bedd down for the night at the end of every 'fake' day and Proteus the award-winning game, that could be mistaken for an over complicated screensaver where a rotating Island evolves in front of your eyes. But we wanted to explore physical features in the design that could work that creative, patient state into the experience.
The psychologist Marlow famously said "If you're holding a hammer everything looks like a nail" So what might be the object of choice that pushed our seven year old out of that 'consumptive' state on a quest for instant gratification.
It was of course the pen and paper.
I would go as far as to reversion Marlow and say:
"If youre holding a pen and paper, everything looks like inspiration..."
Amy had started passing colouring pens our at the end of the workshop as a way to close proceedings independently from any testing agenda.
We had also talked frequently of the desire to paint the walls on the inside of the tent. Very early ideas on our pinterest board had explored this - Overhead projectors, acetate and paint bowls emerged frequently.
It was in a workshop with Seren, Evan and Mira that having asked them to draw their favourite characters (who would you like to see in the tent) we introduced the characters into the projected world by using a cumbersome process of camera phone and photoshop.
The results were brilliant, the kids spent a focused 15 minutes on their designs "Sneezy the sneezy Nose", "Mr Eye" and "Rocket Fish Man" and then were captivated by the delight of watching their characters enter the various worlds, accosted by shoals of fish or tracking the expansive plains of Mars.
Now the plan is to work out how to make this a seemless and self contained interface that allows the drawing to take place inside the tent with a wireless tool and load itself into the server. This means running the entire programme through a live web page. Lee assures us that if we do this we will go down in dome correcting history - as no one has every created live dome content before.
Well there you have it.
What is particularly exciting also was Tom's answer to the question - so how would we draw something in mid air and get it to be read by a computer?
Do we need to use Kinect, infra red cameras and LEDs, motion sensors?
All of these would be worryingly complicated for the time we had available.
Wireless mouse said Tom down the phone - hack a wireless mouse to make it look like a pen and we could ask the kids to draw on the walls of the tent and it would become an animation.
Here is an image of our first mouse pen - and some of its results.
