Development Progress

 Development Progress

    The Chinese Zodiac pattern carries specials meaning and it is well known by the people of world. So I tried to design my first Chinese Zodiac sensor layout. And thank Zimo to draw this picture for me.! 

     The rat is formed by 4 separate shape, and each purple shape is touch area of the sensor. And the input can be customized by the user as well. For example, I can use the two shapes(Control 2 and 3) to move the character to left or right and use Control 1 and 4 for special commend, like use item or special move. 

    To create correspond actions, I input this mouse pattern into Unity and I animated it with 2D skeleton animation. The 2D skeleton animation is pretty easy to use and it is very good to animate sperate shapes.

    But there was a problem when I tried to put my character movement script into my rat. When I played the scene, the rat did not move for unknown reason. Then I think it might be the problem with the 2D skeleton animation and Animator, so I put the same script to a object that does not have Animator on, it moved correctly. I think the problem is when I create the animation, the position is locked by Animator, because the way how this 2D skeleton animation work is very similar to 3D model animation, they both have to move or rotate the skeleton.  So I asked my friend Ken help, he told me that I can create a empty Gameobject, make my rat as the child of this Gameobjet and set up the script on this Gameobject. It works.
    

    Also, I took the image of the Monkey King form Zheng Wang's master thesis paper and I animated it. Somehow, I did not have the same issue with the animation for my Monkey King sprite. It works pretty good.

    Then I set up the AR environment and I tried to play with it a little bit. There is one very important thing for creating a 2D scene in AR environment with Vuforia. We have to change the world center mode in Vuforia Behavior under ARCamera  to First_Target. Otherwise, Everything will fly away and there is no way to let the Gameobjects to know their locations. 

    In addition, I created another project for more complex pattern. In this project I used a pattern form the carpet, and I assume there few parts of this pattern are "smart". This carpet will not be the main input device of the game, it will works as the support tool of the game. The player will still use their touch screen to play the game, but sometime they might need to touch the carpet to help them to overcome some obstacles. For example, I use four dragon heads as the touch areas of the carpet, when the player touch the head, the dragon will blow the wind and push the cloud, so the player can jump on the cloud.

Research Question:

    1. Effective sensor layout design, integrated into a more complex visual design.

    2. User experience - Game play in semi stationary position.

    3. User experience with tactile textile experiences: soft, shape. material juxtaposition between the device touchscreen and the textile

    4. Engagement with Digital cultural heritage using modern interpretation models. Authentic in design

Components:

1.Smart textile with the potential of: being decorative element, being wearable.

2.AR component: a) AR that is locked to the textile image and it uses it as a game element. b) Part of the AR UI exists in physical space as part of the smart textile

3.Cultural heritage: a)Zodiac b)Shadow puppets c)Chinese wall tapestry

4.Game: Play? No win no lose.