E-books

This evening I researched interactive E-books. Here is a video I found showing off one interactive e-book. To be it looks like an interactive website with videos embedded into it. The graphics are lovely and clean.:
https://vimeo.com/48353067

Additionally I explored the Pottermore website because it is similar to an e-book. You get to explore the website, read extracts from the books, read about the character, environment of the world and objects in it. Additionally you can sort yourself into a house and take a quiz to get a your wand and patronus. It is an enjoyable website that lets you explore more of the world of the book.
Link: https://www.pottermore.com/book-extract-long/platform-puzzler

One thing I noticed about e-books is that the children's ones have animations that are interactive. The images are quite colourful. All the electronic books that I have on my mobile are text only. So perhaps they have included interactive animations in the children's one so that children would be interested in reading the e-book.

Prototype Presentation

Preparing For Prototype Presentation

The prototype presentation is this week so I need to edited my scan photos of the prototypes. After I scanned them you could barely see what they were. Therefore I used the editing technique we learnt in class with the threshold and curves tools in Photoshop. However they were still not clear enough after editing them so I opened each of them in Photoshop and created a Photoshop version of them. Here are the edited versions:

Interactive book research

http://stepinbooks.com/?portfolio=wuwu-co
Wuwu & Co. – A magical picture book

It is an award winning interactive picture book you follow the adventures of five odd creatures, who need your aid during the coldest winter in 2.000 years.

Here is a short video I found on an interactive ebook for children. By the looks of it they can use voice recognition and movement to the iPad causes something to happen in the world. Now if I had the skills I would apply their technique to my virtual reality story. Also what's interesting is the art work as well and how the characters are animated. 

Changing perspective to first POV!

I was in college this morning working on the environment of the video. I now have a roof on every room and the lighting looks good. I still need to sort out the book doorways between each room and create the 3D sword in 3D max. Animate the sword and fire in game launcher using code. But I believe that once all those tasks are complete it will be finished. ( Fingers crossed). Additionally I followed a tutorial on how to change it from 3rd person point of view to first person. The tutorial made it seem so complicated but all you had to do was open the blueprint for the 3rd person point of view and move the camera so its in front of the avatars face. Here are some videos I recorded of walking through the environment as first person POV:

Font style

My video is going to have text because it is a prototype of a virtual reality story. In my last blog post I looked at the position of the text. Today I researched the different font styles. I'm leaning more towards a typewriter kind of style. I like the old-fashioned style of it and it is clear to read as well which is important! Here is a mood-board I created of styles I like. I show it in black and white just to see which is clearer. I may have to have two layers of it, one black and one white which would cause a shadow. This is because my environment is full of color and a single layer of text might not be visible enough.

Testing position of text

Because my idea is an virtual reality experience of a story, there needs to be text on the screen. This would be the text the user would need to read out load in order to move forward in the story.
I used Photoshop to test the position of the text. Here are my examples: