Never Fade Out

Blurb

Never Fade Out is an interactive film. This adventure story tells that the sperm must overcome considerable difficulty to meet with the egg and finish a successful fertilization. It offers a new angle for people to see the birth of a baby. Audiences can interact with the video and experience the difficulties by acting as the main character ‘sperm’, detected by Kinect and processed by processing. The visual effect is mainly produced by Maya, Final Cut Pro X and After Effect Software.

NFO LogoIntroduction & Concept DevelopmentThere is no doubt that people know about the definition of birth, but do they know about the entire biological system and process? The answer might be no. We designed an interesting interactive intuitional film that not just restores this biological process by 3D. What we want to do is to give people an incredible virtual interaction experiment and help them to understand the true meaning of a newborn!

The reason why we are trying to do this project is because more and more people nowadays are “DINK” which is an unusual phenomenon for our generations. It is irregular phenomenon for people, they both got good jobs and high salaries but without a child such is a pity in our lifetime. Through this interaction film just want to give people a notice to tell them it is a really meaningful responsibility to give a birth. It is not a trouble. It Honored.

Life will be continuing whether if people are passing away but your generation will be continue on your behalf. That means they might would help you to finish the things which you couldn’t achieve in your lifetime or hadn’t have abilities to do. They might make your dream come true. But we don’t want to make the whole project just like documental, which is boring, and no one will to watch it.

The reason why we more focus on video part that is this semester we have leant final cut which we want to develop it more in this semester to decide to combine both of them. But our main major is “interaction design”, without it we think the whole project is lack of structure that’s the reason we still have interaction part of it and I think it can’t be missed.

100% of this project is original idea based on our thoughts. We can do better than this whether if we just copy the ideas from others. Then yes, the outcome is good. But I think people should support original ideas and develop it more. We put lots of efforts of this project. We can record a video from different angles, make an interaction game or just design an art installation. But why we don’t? We want to do a project, which is based on our main & original ideas, which are more meaningful.

“The interaction of waving your hands isn't a direct relation to the sperm and it swimming, so there isn't a clear connection between the interaction and the movement of the sperm towards the egg.

Yes, it is. Assume that people trying to ejaculate while they making love, but do they really know the responsibilities for a baby and be ready as well?”

It is a direct relation to sperm and it swimming, which reflection of responsibilities. You really want to be fast or just hold it to think you want to ejaculate? Through this interaction to give people a time to think about it.It might be a deeply meaning of it, but it is really clear about we are trying to do.

First of it, combined final cut to processing become one thing.

Secondly, you said that:” we didn't see your project at all during the semester, if we had, we would've been able to help you structure and design the project so that the elements worked better together.”

We have already told Phil about all projects in the first place and he should know better about it.

We did have a discus with him, we were trying to make 2 screens for this project in the first place, and after discussion with him we both found a good way to achieve our project properly.

We designed that victory winner effect is because that let people know the victory means you are ready for become a parent or not it seems like just a game, but in other hand, it’s a notice through this video and give a sign for people’s desire. Everyone could be a winner but it doesn’t mean you are the winner for being a good parent.

Actually, it is not confused; people either can watch video part or interact it. The video and interaction part are combined to one. Through the interaction part and people realized that sperm and egg is not just for making fun of it, it’s seriousness and a definition for the life, new generation and continue our life of our generation on our behalf.

Put Out the Welcome MatThe reason why we decide to use iPhone as the prototype of advertisement is that our screen project is analogous to the way they express-sustained and unknown. We have designed a vivid and simple 3D Model and Animation by Maya software to show the process of connection of sperm and eggs. Basically, we simulate the scene with imagined camera angle that our every initial storyboard showed. However, we have to face a practical problem-color display in the screen by projection in the process of modeling and making animation. At the beginning of design, we rendered all scenes with only white and black. Actually, this tone is definitely easy to distinguish whether on the computer or on the screen, but according to iOS Human Interface Guidelines, we realized that it is necessary to design a scene tend to be true but with a little bit difference. So, this scheme is difficult to be understood visually and clearly by audience in the exhibition or public display. Therefore, we try to design a virtual layer as background layer after some discussion and the first scene you see will be as below.

“First scene”

Prototyping Implementation

“Source of Idea”

Actually, before we starting our interactive project, we had drawn the first prototyping based on brainstorm in the paper, aiming to describe our story. Besides, every camera angle needs to be simulated by 3D modeling. First of all, I structured a sperm modeling looks like tadpole, so after that, I changed every single detail to a more reality one according to a picture under the microscope. I try to make the every section of sperm modeling motioned like it in the real environment, so I used the loft based on built curve in Maya.

So, we designed an illusory scene that involves a majority of virtual eggs

in the background layer with a reality egg cell in the topside. Every egg cell can wander everywhere and the sperm will select the only egg to try to connect with that, just like the real environment in the body. Based on our initial proposal, from the beginning of this video, when participant wave their hands, the interactive activity interface pop up. In the following section Interaction Come True the detail design progress will be described.

Keep It RealThe work has been completed in the main. Based on our group proposal, in order to make video and interaction part more coherent, we made a 2 seconds video with fast sound effect as transition and we can wave our hands in front of the screen when video shows “Wave your hands!” In this project, we used Kinect as interaction installation to identify the gesture movement. Moreover, Maya, After Effects and Final Cut Pro are used for making the welcome video. In the process of production, our group often draws on some design principles and user experience idea from relevant references to make our best to meet the need for players. For example, if audiences don’t want to continue to participate the interactive competition, we allow 3 seconds on purpose for quit the interactive interface and then, just wave his hands, the game can be recovered.

Sound DesignIn our initial Group Concept Proposal, sound design is not focused in this project. In fact, the sound element is the strong need for this installation because sound can reflect the process of connection indirectly when you see the interactive video. As you can see, we didn’t use whole background music as our sound design. We specially retained the original diegetic sound in the last part-a ordinary baby birth video. Moreover, we tried to make the sound transformation with video transition synchronously. The reason why we want to use this sound design is that music usually can imply us to image what is about to change, such as playing and connection.

Shot listSho

t Action Camera Type Status

1 Sperm stays at vagina. Move from ELS to MCU, angle from top to

ELSto

done

horizontal level MCU2 Sperm starts his journey. POV the sperm MCU done

3 Sperms are swimming through the cervix.

Camera stands at a point of the cervix and slowly tracks the sperms swimming through this area

MCU done

4The sperm tries every effort to look for the egg, seeing some sperms die half way.

POV the sperm MCU undone

5The sperm comes into the sight of the egg, closer and closer

POV the egg LS undone

6 The sperm sees the egg and swims faster.

From the left side of the sperm

LSto

ECUdone

7The sperm with the right key opens the door of the egg.

Follow the sperm, the sperm at the right of the bottom, the door at the left of the top

MCU done

8The sperm releasing the DNA into the egg, and the egg closes the door to refuse other sperms.

Follow the DNA in the sperm getting into the egg.Angle move from back left of sperm to the left of the sperm

MCU done

9 The egg becomes a baby. The egg at the center MCU

to LS done

The above list is our original shot list. Although some actions are not exactly the same as listed, most of the shots have been accomplished with actions of general idea. Shot 4 shows the difficulty that sperm meets on the way to the egg. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough time to finish this shot and that’s the loss of difficulty, which should be the connection between the video and the interaction part.

Flow Chart

Coding

N

Y

Less than 5 min?

Win Video

N

if hand disappea

rs

Y

N

Win?

Interaction

Transition Video

if hand is detected

Main Video

Start

For the reason that it is the first time that I am in charge of all the code, I separated the whole project into several small programs, trying to realize the individual function first and then integrate them together.

In our project, the core of interaction is to detect the speed of waving hand and transfer it to the speed of swimming sperm. After learning about OpenNI and studying the examples, I found the skeleton detection is more focus on movement of whole body, but what we need is to analyze the data of hand gesture. Therefore, we decided to use the example of hand and gesture detection as our foundation code.

The process of data is very macro. I have to understand what variable could be used in all sections and what variable could just be declared in particular segment. That’s why the example looks easy but I spend lots of time to put the right data to the right array list. The example can get the real time position of identified hand but it records all the position into the same array list. It leads to the impact that that line of ‘hand’ tracking has become line of ‘hands’ tracking, the visual feedback of which looks miserable and there are red lines all over the screen. Figure 1 is the unsatisfied result with two hands tracking.

Figure 1 Hand Detection Error Figure 2 Accomplished Hand Detection

Figure 2 is accomplished hand detection. I classed ‘handtracker’ to record every hand and separated the position by hand ID. The array list will only store the position of the same hand. New hand will have new array list.

Figure 3 Animation Introduced Figure 4 Final Interaction Scene

The next step is to introduce the animation. Figure 3 is the animation following the detected hand. We chose to play a series of png format images frame by frame to realize the animation of sperm and egg, because if we use video, the sperm and the egg would be on the rectangle and that will cover the background, which would look against the grain.

Figure 4 is the final interaction scene. It can be seen that the sperm and the egg are integrated with the background successfully. The connection between the interaction and the video is the difficulty. The main video shows the difficult journey the sperm experiences to achieve the egg and the interaction needs participants wave their hands fast enough to make the sperm move. If the speed of waving hand is too slow, then the sperm will keep still. For the reason that the sperm is not following where the hand is, we restricted the path straight horizontal. The path is presented but the speed is controlled by audience.

Considering sometime the Kinect is not sensitive enough, I set 5 seconds as a transitional period. In this period, if it is the Kinect that just lost the tracked hand, then the hand should be re-detected within this period, so the interaction scene is not supposed to change; if it is true that audience has walked away then no hand will be detected during this period, so the interaction scene will transfer to the main video.

The small-scale testing code of switch between three videos is successful. However, implementing the transitional period and interaction in to the video playing cost me considerable time to debug the integration. Fortunately, the final effect worked just as what we wanted to see.

Key Libraries and FunctionsLibraries Functions Implement

OpenNI

onCreateHands Create, update and destroy the interactive sperm.

onUpdateHandsonDestroyHandshandId To separate the

position and put them to corresponding array list.

handVecList

handsTrackFlagTo hold and recall the position of hand during the transitional 5 seconds.

handVec Current and last position of detected hand, used to calculate the speed of sperm.

Class HandTracker( Sperm )

phandVec

order To record the handID of detected hand.

images In charge of series of images, playing loop animation.

imageCountframe

GSVideo

goToBeginning To reset the video.

timeTo judge whether the video has played to the end.*These two functions are amazing, at first I used a variable to count the frames of playing video and if the frame count is equal to the frame number of video then it means the video has been played once; but later I found these two functions that can do the same thing and they simplified my code in several segments.

duration

ddf.minim Play music during the interaction

User Testing

In week 13, we just tested our project in the computer; almost every section can achieve expected effect, but it has not done that well. In particular, there has a different time delay that reflects in the different computer. We changed and recompiled relevant coding of Kinect and finally, everything is finished.

Reference

《IOS Human Interface Guidelines》