week 10

Due to unexpected problems occurred during the implementation of the planned project, the project and the idea itself were left behind, as the feasibility was quite doubtful.

I was fortunate to find out that another group, which was dealing with a very interesting installation project, was still in the process of putting things together and what is more important lacked the technical solution for the implementation.

The video installation was designed for the school charity toy collecting and was planned to be an interactive project. The concept was build around the idea of the Christmas spirit and giving. A viewer was supposed to face a continuous video track of close ups of children's sad facial expressions, then he was supposed to read the project description with the instructions directing him to hold a hand placed below the installation screen. The hand was designed in a way that it was a red glove, later it became a pair of gloves, stuffed with soft material and it also had a mouse inside it with the scroll and the right side blocked.

A viewer was supposed to hold the hands that would click the left side of the mouse inside and switch the first sad video to the happy one, which would continue unless the hands are let go.

Before I joined the project, the hands and video footage were already done. The question was how to make it work and implement the idea of interaction which was the essential one for this project.

Programming the mouse button to react in a specific way would be a possible thing to do in Adobe Flash, however due to time and resources limitations, some of the aspects of the idea of interaction were modified. A viewer was now supposed to hold the hands in red gloves in order to click the left button and change the first to the second (happy) video track, which after a while will be automatically switched to the first continuous track. This seemed more feasible, and the proposed solution was very surprising and unexpectedly easy - a recently introduced Microsoft Office 2010 had added some new options to Power Point and now it was possible to implement the idea doing the following:

- 1st slide - 1st video, size of the whole slide, looped

- when clicking holding the hands, mouse would click and the first slide will naturally be followed by the second one

-2nd slide - 2nd video, size of the whole slide, played once (time = 1 min)

the whole slideshow was set to loop, so the second slide with the happy close-ups after its 1 minute would change to the 1st slide, which was looped and was playing until interrupted

after the actual presentation some faults were found:

1) second track (1 minute) was too long to watch and uncertainty appears when standing 1 minute in front of the installation, mouse hidden in the hands was not reacting

2) the two tracks could have been split and combined in several sets to show the variety of shots, thus the second slide with happy close-ups does not go back to the 1st again and again starting with the same frame

3) the design of the box where the screen and the rest was put had a winning color contrast of black and red, which grabbed attention, however even though the black looked quite elegant and sleek, in connection with the video content it had lack of correspondence, which could be easily fixed if using the black surface as a reference to a classroom board