18 April 2013

Ricochet - Feed Development Part 4



The characters play a game called Ricochet near the start of the story that basically involves slamming into one another and trying to rack up points by hitting the bouncing glowing bits. Again, not really a scene that was pivotal to the story but an opportunity to really try and get the tracking sorted out.
 
We did two tests one with  the players being tracked with a kinect and the other just with me tracking them manually on the iPad and all this was hooked to an actual working game so that the actors could just try and play the game rather than trying to act like they were playing a game. The still images don't really do justice to it but the difference between the quality of the actors movement when their bodies were actually being tracked and and when they were just pretending to play the game was startling. When they were actually being tracked you could see them crouching, ducking and moving with much more of a sense of purpose than when they were just pretending which mostly involved spectacular leaps. The problem for now is that when they were jumping around and crossing over  each others paths, the tracker would get confused about who was who and the players would find that they were suddenly scoring own goals. This was a problem that I could avoid when I was manually tracking but, when I did that, the whole cause and effect sensation was broken. It might be possible to mount the kinect in the roof looking straight down on the players so they never cross over but my feeling is still that some kind of RF/WiFi tracking where each player has a unique id is the way forward. The game visuals could do with a bit more tarting up too really, I imagine something like plasma pong that you jumped around inside of would be absolutely mind blowing for actors and audience like.


No comments:

Post a Comment