Our project idea has changed, yet again.

After presenting the original concepts, we then changed them to a game in which you blew into your phone to blow up a balloon on the other side of the window (good interaction, no story), to then a scene of a man hanging from a balloon and keeping the same blowing interaction (good story, weak interaction). We were all pretty happy with the latter, but as we individually thought about it more and more, we all realized that we weren’t that jazzed about it.

Then, during class, we had to go and take a look at the windows where the final installation will take place. Holy cheeseballs are they narrow!! Maybe a foot deep? Bananas, I’m telling you.
So Wippy, Kris and I started talking (Emmanuel was feeling under the weather and went home early) and we brought back an idea we had had a while back that involved the spinning beachball you get when your mac is frozen, and how waiting was a funny way of using the theme in an interesting way.

We started riffing off the idea and talking about what’s culturally relevant, and landed on an idea that promises to be deliciously ridiculous in it’s execution, but interesting in its concept–my favorite mix. Here it is:

This is our mockup for the window. The idea is that there will be a bunch of screens around a giant beachball cutout that is constantly spinning, as if loading. Once the user comes over to the window and touches a capacitive sensor to help it “finish load” the ball will stop and all the videos in the surrounding screens will “load.”
The idea is to hinge on the “right now” and bring up things that are culturally relevant to our time and the fact that the internet houses such crazy amazing things.
We will have a total of six screens that will be playing different videos:

1. A webcam and gives you a live feed of yourself
2. A live feed of Tokyo or somewhere in Asia (and that way play with the right now again but the fact that it’s a totally different time of day somewhere else) OR A live feed of a kitten cam, panda cam, or some-other-baby-animal cam
3. A Twitch.tv (social gaming video platform) video
4. A music video–“Happy” by Pharrell seems to be a perfect choice
5. A 3D WebGL sketch that shifts over time
6. Trending tweets for a specific hashtag

I’ve started working on a max patch for the video feeds and we need to figure out how to incorporate the live feeds in the most efficient way, but we like it! Now, we just need to figure out what to do with the second window, and we’ll be ready to go.