The plan for today is to continue the 2nd experiment for the phones project.

Based on the tech studies on using magnets and gesture recognition, I had the idea of making an audio-centric game where the player walks in the woods / wilderness looking for a specific thing they lost. In order to navigate this space, they draw symbols on the ground that lead them into different areas / moments.

The prototype’s basic idea

1st moment: the entrance

In a first moment, the players have to point their phone towards the south. This acts as an entrance to the game, and also as a way to establish a more firm basis of reference for the previously calibrated drawing patterns. This is because the phone’s magnetometer is influenced by the Earth’s magnetic field, so the data recorded for each pattern gets basically scrambled every time the phone gets rotated/moved.

I think that in an audio-centric game, this moment of alignment / introduction can be useful to establish both the game’s atmosphere and its pace.

2nd moment: drawing decisions

After entering the woods, the player will listen to the narration talking about what they are looking for / describing the environment. When a decision needs to be made, an audio cue (white noise? rain?) will increase in volume, indicating that the algorithm is now detecting the drawings in the ground / active area. Another possibility for that would be checking the microphone loudness: if there is sound above a certain threshold, then the gesture recognizer is run, so players need to make noise / speak while drawing. As a last format, maybe just touching the phone’s screen while drawing could work. I’ll have to test these out and see what feels more interesting.

creating the prototype

My plan is to continue with the OSC prototyping flow that I tested in the previous work sessions.