Week Nine - The Acceleration

 Week Nine

We had a small group meeting on Friday to work on the body suit to finish the chest, tummy, and back parts. I had to keep the same pose for Kaenan and Preeti to work simultaneously.  However, we had to meet on Sunday again to work on the bottom and leg parts. Kaenan worked on my right leg and Vivian helped work on another side which saved a lot of time. When we got to the bottom part, I had to keep bending over for Kaenan to put tape on which is the hardest for the whole time. We were in a rush to finish to suit because we were going to have a dress rehearsal on Monday that only opened for our friends. So Kaenan spent sacrificed her spare time to sew all the wires in, and Vivian soldered the wires on the sensor. 

Before this Rehearsal, everyone was assigned a role in this show. Kaenan is the puppet's "safety guard" to stop any inappropriate touch naturally (don't break the show) if I can't handle it. Nick is the Ring Master to control the process of the show. At the beginning, Nick will explain how the prompt card works, he also pushes the participants to interact with the puppet and makes everyone uncomfortable. When the puppet gets too much touch and broken (end of the show), he is going to act and restart the puppet (restart the show). I as the puppet, will have a wild smile to welcome the participants at the beginning. As they interact more with me, I'll turn into a cold face. When I hear the music at the highest pitch as the index value sent by the sensor goes up and the "error message window" pops up in the up-left corner screen, I shack participants' hands off and act broken/self-protecting to show the ending of the show. I'll stay in this "mode" until Nick comes to restart me, and I'll reset myself to a T-pose and face to the main camera for better Kinect tracking and then face to the audience side to show the second round of the show starts.

As in the video, the participant was not willing to give the puppet an in-contact hug because he still thought the puppet was a human. Giving a random person a bear hug breaks the boundary between people which is uncomfortable. We had most people like this, especially for males. Even though he did the direction on the prompt card, we still got feedback saying triggering the audio/visual effect was fun but interacting with the puppet was uncomfortable.

Next week

We found some inaccurate values sent from the touch sensor. We will do some debugging and trouble shooting in week ten.