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AR Facade Moves Beyond the Lab
Renata writes "Researchers from Georgia Tech's GVU Center have installed AR Façade at the Grand Auto Text exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, CA. The AR Façade installation presents an augmented reality version of desktop-based game Façade. The exhibit marks the first time this elaborate augmented reality interactive drama has been seen outside the GVU lab. The AR Façade immersive drama presents the virtual characters of Façade inside a real, physical apartment. Players play the role of an old friend invited over for drinks at a make-or-break moment in the collapsing marriage of the reactive characters, Grace and Trip. While some players attempt to pacify the characters, others break the ice with comic relief, performing for friends who can observe the unfolding drama from outside the exhibit. The uneasy social situation becomes all too real as players are able to move freely throughout a physical apartment and use gestures and speech to interact with the autonomous characters who appear graphically imposed in the space using a video-mix head-mounted AR display. The three month long exhibition will be open to public until December 15th."
It is funny to read some of the scripts after someone else has played it.
...Anyway, I was going to bring out some pesto infused sun dried tomatoes, but they need to marinate a little longer, so...
[While Trip is in the kitchen]
GRACE
Adam,
GRACE
I'm... mmm... you've been a good friend for a long time, and I...
[Trip enters]
TRIP
What was that?
GRACE
What?
ADAM
Nothing.
TRIP
Something's been happening in here...
ADAM
No there hasn't.
TRIP
So to those Slashdotters out there who have a girlfriend, or know what a girl is, here's your chance. Addict her to the joys of cutting-edge tech with the new take on that hoary old standby, the soap opera. Just think...one exposure to this and she'll be dragging you back to the scene of the crime again, and again, and again. You'll even be able to justify canceling that holiday in the Bahamas to buy the AR display and software.
Then, the minute her back's turned, you can use the set-up for it's REAL purpose: interactive pr0n!
By this time tomorrow, I'll be invested up to my neck in Vaseline and Kleenex futures. I'm gonna be RICH!!!!!!!!!!!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I think you're being unfair here. They could very well have a supersweet natural language parser going on.
It doesn't matter.
The job of the avant garde is to scout the terrain ahead to avoid leading the army into a dead end or a massacre.
Facade is definitely avant-garde; I'm just up in the air about whether it's a dead end or a massacre.
Yes, the artwork is, well, ugly. The characters are not pleasant to look at, and the walk around like John Wayne in bad need of a box of ExLax. The narrative should suck you into the story, instead it just sucks. To play Trip's role, you need to care about and like the unhappy couple. Instead, you're confronted with two bitter, ugly creatures in an ugly apartment.
But all that is beside the point. The core problem is the concept. This is supposed to explore computer games as interactive psychological drama, as a way to communicate rich emotional tones with subtle details. You are supposed to interact with the two AI characters about their relationship. But no parser can be fine enough to the task. So the user becomes immediately aware of the irreality of the situation: yes, they are fighting; no I don't think I'm ever going to be fed. I am supposed to do something, but whatever I type in doesn't get understood; or if it does, it's not understood correctly. I mean, it might work in a sort of "Premenstrual Eliza" kinda way, but it's not a game anyone really wants to play.
Rockstar Games denies the existence of threesome code in the original release.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Please ask any question desired. I know more.
Is the Euler-Mascheroni Constant irrational?
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
In the US release, you can commit a double homicide as long as everyone keeps their clothes on. In the EU release you can have any combination of sex but no blood. In the JP release... Well lets no go there shall we. Tentacles probably will be included.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
While many of the comments are pretty amusing, I thought I'd reply to this one.
:)
:)
The registration between the characters and the world is negatively affected by a variety of things including
(a) the original facade rendering engine does not use real 3D perspective, and converting (due to the way trip and grace are procedurally rendered) would have been a huge undertaking; we spent some time on this and decided it wasn't going to be worth the effort, in the end. So they appear to float as they move away from the player and don't perfectly align with things like the door or bar
(b) the lighting it the room (at Georgia Tech) was not quite good enough for the tracker (which uses a camera to track markers on the ceiling); the lighting in the room at the Beall Center is much better. We didn't have the money to upgrade the lighting in the lab just for this experiment so it's a little jittery
(c) this is an open system, meaning the graphics, camera and tracker are not tightly synchronized (since the tracker is a separate commercial product running in parallel to the rest of the system). So there are slight misalignments there caused by the lack of sync
We are not doing any computer vision through the camera that is looking forward into the room; I don't do computer vision research, although it's obviously going to be important to integrate such things into a real system. Unfortunately, tracking natural features reliably (relative to a known baseline) and integrating those points with the rest of the system for stable pose estimation is not at the "cheap commodity" level yet, although some products are getting tantalizingly close (e.g., the Total Immersion stuff). If someone wants to solve that one and put it on SourceForge, send me a link.