This week, visiting scholar Anthony Daniels dropped in to have a look at what we’re working on. As a performer who has quite a bit of experience acting alongside imaginary/invisible co-stars, his input was invaluable as we attempt to translate these well-established film-acting principles to the stage. With our Peter and Wendy now officially cast, we’ll be meeting with our actors next week to get their measurements for costumes (naturally) and (less naturally) for the purpose of creating digital representations of them in our AR world.
Here’s what else has been happening this week:
Set Design – A formal ground plan of our set was drafted that places all of the set pieces/furniture in their intended locations. This will allow us to digitize the set as well, enabling the programming magic that powers the AR effects to happen. Additionally, we taped out the dimensions of our set/playing area in the actual theater space, which does wonders in making everything feel more real.
Programming – We’ve spent most of the week working on networking multiple HoloLenses together to ensure that more than one audience member can experience the performance at the same time. We looked at a sample project where two people wearing HoloLenses could inhabit the same AR world an interact with a few augmented objects. We’re now in the process of inserting our Tinker Bell into such a shared world and seeing how it looks.
Additionally, our project would be greatly aided by the ability of non-HoloLens wearers (both audience members and crew) to see what Tinker Bell is doing on stage. To that end, we’re looking into a solution called “Spectator View,” which essentially bolts a HoloLens to a DSLR camera and streams out to external monitors. Setting this up requires us to use a 3D printer to make some kind of mount piece, so that’s always a fun experiment. We’ll be getting this set up hopefully by next week. Take a look at this weird little rig in the meantime:
Script/Story – We completed rough storyboarding/actor blocking, and made some edits to the script that came out of that process. This will help both our cast members and the animation/programming process as they begin to place Tinker Bell in the world!
Animation – By Monday, we’ll have a completed rig of our Tinker Bell model that will be ready for some animating! Our crack animation team has been poring over reference videos and creating plans based off the storyboarding/blocking we created.
Next week we’ll have updates on our networking process, reports on meeting with our (human) actors (!), and preparations for our mid-semester halves presentation the following week.