The Thing Growing -Description
To you the Thing looks translucent. The triangular shapes forming its head,
appendages and body do not seem to join up. It changes colors as it speaks
and according to its moods. It is alternately bullying and loving. It has
no specific gender. By turns it is joyful, angry, aggressive, pathetic,
manic - much like most of us. But it is a virtual being.
The focus of The Thing Growing, is the construction of this "Thing,"
a virtual, interactive, animated character for the CAVE virtual reality
theater. The goal of the project is to create an interactive story in which
the user takes a leading role and is engaged at an emotional level with
the Thing.
Concept
Issues of control and power cross The Thing Growing at every
level. First, it is the computer that drives the narrative. The user's
interaction with the Thing is monitored by a story manager which pushes
the user through the different stages of the story. At one point the user
and Thing struggle with each other, at another they have a common enemy.
The climax comes when the user has to make a decision - to eliminate the
Thing or to let it live. (A storyboard at
http://www.evl.uic.edu/anstey/THING/STORYBOARD shows this development.)
Secondly the relationship between Thing and user is intimate but antagonistic.
The user first encounters the Thing by rescuing it from emprisonment -
albeit unknowingly. Immediately the Thing is excessively grateful, loving
and intimate. It shows its affection and solicits the user's affection
by insisting that the user dance with it. If you comply with its demands
it takes your dancing as a show of love and obediance.
But in the long run nothing pleases the Thing. Like an abusive spouse
or parent it inflicts its moods on the user. When it's unhappy it bullies
and criticises you, however perfectly you dance. In fury it leaves you
and climb under a large rock. In the next stage of the interaction, all
the other large rocks in the scene come alive and herd and hunt the user.
Inevitably you are caught. Only then does the Thing return - it will liberate
you if you are "nice" to it.
The story is a metaphor for relationships in which power is unequal
and abused. The user is put in the Thing's world, and tricked and manipulated
by the Thing's superior knowledge and influence in that world. My intention
is to create an environment for "living out/working out/playing out"
the frustration, conflict and relentless repetition of disfunctional relationships.
I am hoping the virtual environment will work on two levels - drawing the
user into an actual emotional engagement in the melodrama; and promoting
a consciousness of how ridiculous and unwinnable this situation is that
will create the necessary distance for analysing emotional reactions.
Method
The Thing Growing is programmed
using the VR authoring system Dave Pape first developed for "The
Multi Mega Book in the CAVE" and "Mitologies." The Thing
is animated by using motion tracking to build up a library of actions.
Each action lasts a few seconds and has a corresponding sound bite. As
the program runs, the Thing's intelligence unit selects an appropriate
action and sound according to the point in the narrative, the user's actions,
and the Thing's own emotional state.
The Thing gathers information about the user's position, orientation
and activity from the CAVE's tracking system. It then interprets that information
to determine if the user is attentive, compliant, active, lazy or indifferent.
This information feeds back to the Thing's emotional state and behavior.
In addition to monitoring the user in general,the program checks specific
user movements. For examply, knowing whether the user is dancing correctly
will feed back both to the Thing's emotional component and to its decision-making
process. It may decide to repeat a part of the dance that the user is doing
incorrectly. It will admonish, encourage or praise the user according to
the user's behavior and its own mood.
The programming method both follows and enables the content goals of
this application. It ties the user into the interactive system, so that
his or her actions and reactions become and integral part of the whole
experience.
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