The idea of our project is to simulate a rock concert. The screen shows a pretty basic representation of a concert audience with the fan representing the user highlighted and in the center. The user can interact with the instrument by performing some basic rock concert movements like headbanging, waving the arms and jumping. The movements of the user are directly mirrored by the fan representing the user and gradually the rest of the audience will join the user in his movements. We were inspired by the headbanging-module and parts from a video of a performance of the Blue Man Group. So we decided to combine the two and expand on the basic ideas.
-creating animations for the user and the audience in flash
-playing multiple quicktime movies in max-msp simultaniously
-combining the movies with chromakeying
-detecting the movements of the user with cyclops
-using the cyclops-output to trigger different loops in the movies
-finding working solutions in max for, in theory, pretty simple ideas
-problems with cyclops' frequent crashes
-unexpected and sometimes not logical behavior of some max components
-learning flash
-improvement of motion detection
-addition of more moves
-adding reactions of the band to what the audience/the user is doing
-controlling the other members of the audience individually instead of having different groups
-using some form of swarming algorithm to control the audience
-allow more than one user to interact
-The Blue Man Group - The Complex Rock Tour
-i10 headbanging-module
The basic idea is to simulate a rock concert environment. While there is no user interacting the music will play and the audience will do some basic movements. There will be a couple of songs playing in a looping playlist. The user can influence what the rest of the audience does through his interactions. For example he can start head banging and the longer he does the more people in the audience will join in. If all the people in the audience are really rocking there will be some kind of feedback. Other movements we want to include are clapping, jumping, raising the hands, showing them evil horns, etc. The movements will be done by video capturing and maybe also by taking some audio input from the user to trigger events.
We are planning to show a view of the audience from stage, with one person in the audience highlighted in some way, that reacts directly to the user's inputs, so the user has some feedback to what he is doing. The highlighting may be a special color or something along the lines of a spotlight. To make the program visually more interesting there could be some visualization of the playing music in the background and maybe some kind of lightshow.
Since doing this with real people would be pretty complicated, we are thinking about using a very basic, cartoon-like animation.