The Enchanted Forest

The Enchanted Forest is an interactive installation that creates the illusion of walking into a book and translating the experience of falling into the world of the book and navigating through mishmash of multicultural fairy tale and folk tales as the female protagonist of the story. The narrative of the heroine against all odds is archetypal and fragmented, the objects are symbolic to represent the key elements of a story, and the visual style is slightly off-kilter, surreal and dreamlike to evoke a state of disorientation, fantasy and delusion.

The viewer enters a room where they pick up a “magic flashlight,” a portable, hand-held digital video projector with a 3-axis accelerometer inside of it. When the viewer turns it on, the magic flashlight will project a beam of light on the surface of a sparsely illustrated wall. The video projection changes depending upon the direction and orientation of the magic flashlight to the wall. The experience of using the magic flashlight is similar to how a normal flashlight works; it illuminates a dark space, while the magic flashlight illuminates AND reveals hidden elements of the black and white drawings on surface of the walls. The user would hear audio cues that they have “found” something and then click the button on the flashlight to access the object.

The desired user experience would be to have the user explore the space with the magic flashlight and try to find all of the hidden objects, in an attempt to piece together the narrative. Thus the initial engagement of the interactive device draws the user in, while the time spent “egg hunting” pays off with richer content. Each user would have a different experience since the objects themselves would change at random (every time a new user interacts with the magic flashlight, the system would reset and repopulate the world with new objects).

The environment is based loosely on that of a mythical forest, a place were magical creatures live, where characters get lost, and where truths are discovered. In nearly all cultures, the forest is not only a familiar locale in which real people lived in and nearby, but a place that embodies the darker side of humanity. I am interested in exploring those dark, unfathomable places that reside in our subconscious by bringing viewers to a familiar jumping off-point – back to their childhood – where they can remember what it was like to believe in the improbable, nonsensical and unreal.

The overall narrative structure of the story would follow the same flow, as many stories have interchangeable elements that serve similar purposes in a given story. The story itself is highly subjective and inferred by the viewer... there is no specific order that things occur in. The story is created in discrete parts, and is told through the suggested relationships between the objects the user discovers, as an archaeologist forms his or her own narrative based on the artifacts uncovered at a dig site. Additionally, the mythology of fairy tales will hopefully be familiar to most audiences and the story can be understood (on a low level) as a morality tale gone awry.

Progress!

So it has been a fruitful past couple of days... Thursday I got my accelerometer working (I had used the wrong 3.3V regulator datasheet and hooked it up wrong) and Friday I spent the whole day getting the projector part working. I had to rewire and resauter since the original wires were brittle and breaking! Once I got everything hooked up, it was a great feeling... The resolution was better than expected and the brightness factor seems to be OK since I replaced the original projector bulb w/ a extra bright Xenon bulb. I hooked it up to a security camera to get video input and check the image quality.

Here are some pics:





Next step is to get the projector into a temporary housing made from foam core so I don't have to hold all the parts to see a projection. I just picked some up from Pearl Paint today. This weekend, I am programming the interactivity in Director to work with the accelerometer.

Loveliness in its forms

I forgot to post my diagram from yesterday... here it is, thought I am changing it:




Ok, so I am somewhat frustrated. I FINALLY have all my parts today and I got my Arduino mini working and wired up the board, added the 3.3 V voltage regulator and got some numbers out of the Serial port... but they are all zeros!! Eh! I don't know why I am not getting anything out of my accelerometer. Here is a pic:



Anyway, I am going to bug Vida tomorrow and figure out what's going on... I can't tell if its a power issue or if my sauter job was insufficient. My money is on power!

A long time coming

So I have been bad about blogging. Not that I haven't been working on my projects... quite the contrary. I have been reading, researching, ewindowshopping for parts, and getting better at Arduino and wiring the breadboard. It is starting to all make sense to me!

I should really post a picture of Darwin w/ skin. He is pretty cute. I feel bad for not documenting that project better. :(

My final project will be a video projector, but not any projector, but one that can change the image based on the orientation of the projector using an accelerometer. I am Wii obsessed, especially after beating Zelda. Woohoo! I need to find the descriptive text I originally wrote for the project. However, the final will be different after talking about my project in class. I will have to simplify and adjust my original idea, but I really really really don't want to attach a potentiometer to the projector. Bleah!

Anyway, I have my work cut out for me. I will try to be better about blogging from here on out!!