Sandcastle

Created for Round 4 (the "story round") of Building Virtual Worlds, Sandcastle is a virtual performance piece about a boy and a girl at a beach, each trying to build his and her own sandcastle, only to be thwarted again and again by a large wave. Each of the two performers are wearing head-mounted displays and are holding special devices that track the positions of their hands. Using the head-mounted displays and trackers, the actors' live performances are inserted into the virtual beach.

Sandcastle was very well-received by the class instructors, and was lauded for its simplicity, charm, great interactivity between the performers, and flawless network programming of two head-mounted displays.

Funny remembrance from Future Walt: About 10 minutes before we were to show the final presentation of Sandcastle, I decided that the story was way too long. So I got the team together and we cut out about half of the story. We rehearsed once and then performed it live to a great reception -- the shorter version was so much better. Thankfully none of the software needed to be modified because all the events were triggered either by the performers' actions or by special keys programmed into the game that I would press during the performance.

"Old School" Reenactment

Here's a video worth maybe a couple laughs. Especially if you want to see me in drag.

For the Visual Story class at the ETC, my team, The Warner Brothers, re-created a scene from the movie Old School. I co-star along with Dan Driscoll.

Flint Ball

Today I showed off Flint Ball, which is a small multiplayer game that my team made for Round 3 of Building Virtual Worlds.

Flint Ball is a game of stone-age soccer played by large audiences. Each member of the audience is given a remote control, and the audience is divided into two teams. Each team is further dived into two in-game "players". For each player the inputs of the remote controls are averaged to determine the direction in which the player should move. There is also a camera connected to the game, and if one of the teams jumps out of their seats then the ball will be kicked forward a short distance.

The audience playing the game seemed to have a great time -- there were many yells and shouts!