Sketch One Outcome: Fairy Companion

We presented our Sketch One projects yesterday. To recap, our project is inspired from Peter Pan's Tinkerbell. Because she is so small she is only able to elicit one emotion at a time. Hence, the goal is for the user to move in a way that allows the fairy to become comfortable enough to stay close by, otherwise it will scare away quickly.

Our group's project worked out about as expected, with a couple additional features. We managed to get an animation of the fairy going, as well as get it to change its color to red when flying away from the participant (to depict a scared/angry emotion). Here is a video demonstration of our project:

Also, here are parts of our max patches:

We used bounding boxes to read the size and location of the user, so we could offset the fairy.

Centroids were drawn to get the centre point of the camera image.

We added in an animation of the fairy (done in flash) and calculated the point at which it should start flying away (based on the user's speed and size). Before this, we were using a white ball to test out the interactions.

Series of "if" statements to determine the fairy's location.

Made the fairy turn red when flying away, otherwise it stayed yellow.

Mirrored the camera image, so the user can accurately see their movements on the same side.

This is the final outcome - the fairy is staying close and liking the user in this case!

We did consider incorporating multiple fairies and participants, however due to the complexity of the bounding boxes and centroids we kept it to a single fairy and participant. However, it would be a goal if we were to move this project forward in the future.