Category: 07

My telematic project is a digital watercolor canvas where different users can interact with each other by overlapping colors and transparencies to imitate real life watercolor bleeding techniques.

https://watercolor.glitch.me

https://glitch.com/~watercolor

I used transparent ellipses to achieve the watercolor effect, and I used the same array format as the simple shared drawing canvas (used lines) to approach drawing the ellipses to push the imitation of water color effect even further (than just transparency). Instead of drawing the ellipses all the same size, the array allowed me to make the "watercolor" look like more varied strokes.   There is supposed to be equal roles as each player has the same abilities and this canvas is asynchronous, but the randomization of what each player gets as they log on is up to chance (some colors may stand out more than others). I took away the ability to see the other players cursers so that the main focus was on the differing colors for each play and the intimacy the transparencies/colors  (players brush strokes) overlapping each other.

PAINT BELOW (press and drag mouse):

 

Cursor Tag

Here is how it works:

This interactive game is tag (or maybe hide and seek?) with cursor.

In this game you only see your cursor, but you can 'sense' the other players as your pointer cursor changes directions based on the position of it (if you are a normal player) or of the closest prey (if you are it). The playground gets smaller every time someone gets tagged.

This game is (literally) inspired by our classic childhood game tag. (The fact that this is purely digital instead of physical is kinda a sad reminder of how digital our life has been:/ )I enjoy the nervous feeling when players are the game with other people, they are aware of others' presence but they are also alone on the canvas and don't know who the others are. (Isn't this also how life works?) Especially since this is a game that requires people to play it together in the same room, this digital loneliness is even more emphasized.

If i have more time I am definitely going to improve the tag system (because it is currently not working very well) and it would probably be more interesting if everytime a player gets tagged, everyone gets fatter (collision radius bigger) so it becomes more challenging for the normal players to hide.

 

Two Faced is a collaborative face created by two networked face trackers. One user controls the bottom half of the face. The other controls the top.

Initially, I wanted to create a chat room extension of my mouth project from the previous assignment. However, the difficulty of networking video across the Internet made me simplify my approach. I still wanted to play with faces, and I still wanted to include an interesting real time interaction between multiple people, so my second idea was the collaborative face. In an expanded project, I would experiment with which parts of the face I would separate between different clients. I would also distort a real image of a face instead of drawing simple polygons because I really wanted to emphasize the uncanny-ness of splitting up a face among multiple people. A less necessary optimization would possibly to gamify the collaborative face and request the users to react to a social situation collaboratively. For example, I could record a first-person video of a social scenario and take pictures of the collaborative face at key moments when the users are expected to react. At the end of the scenario, I would present the users with all captured images.

A gamified recode of Scott Snibbe's Boundary Functions (1998.)

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We're all prisoners of capitalism, what matters is the size of your cell. Choices abound: will you maximize your resources, or minimize your space wastage for efficiency's sake? Outmaneuver your "friends!" This recode of a classic interactive projection piece uses the participants' mouse locations to construct a Voronoi diagram through synchronous collaboration. The game is anonymous and purposefully competitive, pitting players against each other in a very, very small-scale simulation of the 'real world'.

Reducing users to sites on a Voronoi diagram, a graphical representation of proximity and 'territory', seems to imply something about the failure of communication inherent among discrete entities like human beings. Depending on each user's goal (and whether they share complimentary goals), patterns of motion created here include chasing others, fleeing from them, or hiding in a corner, like one might do at any college party.

Unlike Snibbe's piece, I used the p5 Voronoi library instead of doing complicated math. I also took advantage of polygon area and merge sort functions I found online. The hardest part was integrating sockets (and this functionality is still very buggy.) The gif below shows the slightly-more-functional single-player version with randomized sites. If I had more time, I'd ideally let the players (collectively?) decide how many random sites they wanted to be generated.

Sketches (sadly, this is all I have):