Since I’ve decided to give technology a greater role in my illustrations, I wanted to explore a range of different ways digital media is used for creative story-telling.
Alternate Reality Games
In the past, I’d read into the mystery of Junko Junsui and explored it a bit myself, as well as others like it such as The Strange Case of Daisy Brown, and The Sun Vanished.
Fictional characters online
Lil’ Miquela.
Augmented Reality
Nadine Kolodziey and Susi Vetter.
My Attempt at AR
I wanted to try out some AR effects of my own to see if I could use them with my project. I wanted to start myself off with an easy introduction to augmented reality, so I started with the task of displaying a digital image over a physical trigger image.
After I’d managed this simple effect, I thought about taking my AR attempts a step further and try to add animation to my illustration. I considered that maybe instead of some objects having a physical interaction, AR can be used to animate things moving to reveal hidden items around the room. For example, rather than having the rucksack simply peel open, I could animate it being unzipped and reveal the contents that way. Doing this would certainly make it more of a challenge for an audience to find interactive objects.
One of the first troubles that I had with trying to apply the animation directly to the illustration was that the AR program I was using didn’t allow enough accuracy for me to place my animation directly over the object. I also had no way of masking the trigger image underneath unless I also added a large piece of the composition to the animation, which looked really messy when seen through AR. So, I tried to simplify things even further for my test and focus on a simple object to animate.
Even this came with its issues when I tested it out.
I think that the main problem that I had with making my AR effects was that the program I was using just wasn’t up to scratch. For starters, the program was overly-simplified to the point that it was nearly impossible to customise the position of the display. It was pretty much designed to work with really simple trigger images and effects, which wasn’t something I was comfortable with when I was just stretching my legs working with AR. There were also a lot of limited options in terms of animation; I couldn’t disable the looping of animation or set the animation to auto-play without the need for a button to activate it. Overall, while I’m still really interested in learning more about AR, I’m convinced that I need to find a better program to make my effects if I’m going to make anything worthwhile.
alicia hempsted 