The Work This Week:

Week nine was spent preparing for Halves.

Halves presentations at the ETC are our first chance to publicly share our work. Presenting to students, faculty, and various clients, we are given fifteen minutes to explain our project, and our process. Afterwards, there is five minutes avail for questions. They serve to let us practice our formal presentation skills, and to allow faculty not intimately involved in our project an insight into our work.

With Matt and Miriam off at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the rest of the team started gathering materials for our presentation. As Qiqi finished the second draft of the art, Apoorva continued to work on our app, and Axel began structuring the presentation. While the work wasn’t terribly exciting, it was still vitally important to staying on track.

Regarding new work this week; the team has figured out a way to make text from the app on the phone visible to all players at the same time. Using a simple Pepper’s Ghost like setup, it is possible to make a rudimentary hologram above the phone screen, visible on all sides and clear enough to be read easy. The drive behind this concept is to keep players from interacting with the phone as much as possible. Every time a player touches the phone, we run the risk of pulling them out of the world we are trying to build. We expect to take this idea into a second prototype next week.

With Miriam and Matt back in the office on Friday, we finalized the rough draft of our Halves slide-deck and sent it off to our advisers for consideration. With our presentation scheduled for next Friday, we’ll have more time to prep as the week goes on, but we’ll want to make sure not to ignore our continued work on design as well.