developmentworks

Above is an small GIF animation I produced after having watched the video to the left and became inspired. I used an old photo I took just outside of Baldock, Hertfordshire back in 2012 as the background. The idea was the merging of reality and and unreality together, which although the piece is not an example of augmented reality itself, but rather a by product of the idea and considered it'd relate.

If I carry on working on something like this, I'd consider creating a story board or a series of GIFs for a short animation video as an idea for a final piece perhaps.

These were some letterform/typographical(ish) sketchbook drawings I produced regarding deception, fakery and trickery. It was when I was considering a branch or some perception of how augmented reality could be viewed that I though about the path of deceit.

I feel like the immediate two images above could be expanded upon into a narrative about the distortion of reality through lying. Perhaps I could tie this into storyboards for GIF animations like the one at the top of the page or maybe an interactive story where the user could click on links to decide how the story should go and follow through. Kind of like a digital version of adventure books you get where if you want the protagonist to do something, the book provides commands to turn to a particular page depending on what you choices are.

The image to the left was just a work I produced based on the common paradoxical phrase "The following sentence is a lie. I always tell the truth".

The above is a recording of the Trojan.Win32.LoveYou/LoveYou Trojan (Not to the be confused with the ILOVEYOU virus/Love Letter worm that hit computers world wide through the summer of 2000).

LoveYou shows nothing important on the screen, yet imitates hard disk formatting and Flash Bios corruption. Nevertheless, it copies itself to the Windows directory and modifies the Windows registry to be run upon the next Windows start-up. It also renames WIN.COM to WIR.COM so Windows cannot be started normally any more. The only way to get rid of it is to manually delete LOVEYOU.EXE from the Windows directory (from DOS prior to Windows startup) and then rename WIR.COM back to WIN.COM.

Below was a an idea/wireframe of sorts sketched out to produce an (annoying) fake pop up ad. To begin with, I thought about revolving the project idea around deceit, but I was at this point going further into looking into some aspects of interactivity. The user then interacts with the pop up add by clicking on the button provided with the advert.

One idea was that the advert kept showing essentially the same ad (albeit phrased differently) each time a button was clicked until it redirected you back to the original and another idea was that the button wouldn't direct you anywhere, but would keep asking to click the button with messages appearing on it like "come on, you're almost there", "Any minute now..." "[subject] is only a click away" but of course, it would never lead to anything. It was clearly made for the sake of being annoying.

It was partially inspired by the LoveYou trojan payload depicted to the left and pop adverts you often get on the internet.

This was an idea I had a while ago. The premise behind the idea was to generate a 8bit or 16bit avatar of a person a la old computer/video game styled graphics via facial recognition, but it seemed like a pretty complex approach to me, however. At this point in the project, I was looking more into interactive media and how I could produce something that provided at least some interactivity without doing something completely out of my league, but this idea just took the cake.

Nevertheless, I sketched down the idea to have a clearer idea of how it's look and work. The webcam was to pick up the image of the subject and this would be processed and converted through the computer somehow and as a result, a projection of the person's avatar would appear.

But, this would require a lot of coding which would have taken a lot of time to learn, especially as it is not within my field and I would also have to take a lot of time creating a variety of different designs and possible animation frames and would also have to include that within the coding.

The project would just be unfeasible and seems so out of grasp for me to as it'd be just so time consuming.

However, it could be something of interest that leads me onto something else as an alternative.

To the left is a close up on the canvas in the screenshot above. This is more experimental work I did in the freeware application 'FireAlpaca'. I personally find this to be a better alternative to GIMP for me as GIMP does not pick up tablet pressure sensitivity on Mac OS X, while FireAlpaca does. I feel it also has more features, but is simply easier to use as well and has a variety of brushes to chose from.

However, the downside of the program is that FireAlpaca is unavailable for GNU/Linux users currently and the only way I can fathom a way for a GNU/Linux user to use FireAlpaca is by emulating either Windows or Mac OS X and installing the program onto the emulation.

Found this really cool animated by Hombre McSteez that was the source of inspiration for the GIF on the right.

Since I was looking into researching either augmented or interactivity in games, I found these acetate and pain marker animations McSteez produced and found them to be pretty interesting. More of the series can be found on his youtube channel provided in the clickthrough on the video.

Contact sheet of the frames featured in the animated GIF above.

The screenshots here are from a couple of ideas I had for a final project. An Interactive story. It kind of came to me when I began just doodling this static image, to be honest, I was hoping to work with it.

It is drawn in FireAlpaca, so I am also making use of Freeware/OpenSource Software while I'm at it. It's a pretty good drawing software for mac and it's like a combination of a basic Photoshop program and Japanese drawing software Paint Tool Sai

Screenshots of the figure in her introductory people. I've named her 'Sunny' because she has a sunny smile. I included screenshots providing a colour palette for her when she appears in the images for this story, so that I can use it as a primary guide while colouring her.

Images are 500x500 as it's what I typically find most comfortable working in and the a squared canvas is the most aesthetically pleasing to me.

The generally idea of the mechanics is that it works kind of like the Choose Your Own Adventure Books that were ever so popular throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. These books were of course contained fantasy stories, but primarily it was either science fiction based (such as aliens and planetary quests) or the typical medieval variety of fantasy with your wizards, warlocks and witches and so on.

They are peculiar books, but they contributed to interactive narrative as we see it today and they can be considered as one of the earlier origins of interactive digital fiction.

Nevertheless, I do not plan on producing something nearly as long as these tales due to time limitations.

The screenshots here are colour palette references for not only Sunny, but also her friends 'Lil' Slugger' and Spectra.

It's just easier to keep track for when I have to colour multiple pictures with them. I'll either use colour palettes or make sure to keep windows open of them to use the colour pick tool on.

The images provided below are two images that were going to be part of the story, but I didn't include them due to time limitations. There was also going to be an alternative to the big bad wolf.

Aliens were also going to be included as a primary antagonist as well. Sunny was to discover their raygun and track them down to prevent their misdeeds.