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:

Testing walkthrough of environment.

My 3D environment isn't finished yet but I filmed this walkthrough on my phone just to test it out. One thing that I found was that it was not smooth walking around. I did have my phone in one hand filming and was using the keyboard and mouse to move around with my other hand. I still need to learn how to record it on the computer but hopefully when I am filming it that way it will be easier to control and move smoothly around.
Here are a few videos of my test footage.

Update on 3D environment!

I was under the weather this week so I didn't get to work on this project until this morning. I went into college at 9.30 am and started working on the other rooms in my projects environment. The prototype presentation is just around the corner so I'm working hard to get the environment finished before then. I designed a 3D book in 3D max and imported it into game launcher. I added lighting fixtures and ceilings to nearly all of the rooms. I still need to add a ceiling to the library room but I'm nearly there!
My goal is to get it finished in week 10. That leaves 2 weeks to add the text in after effects and film the walkthrough.
Here are some shots of the environment so far:

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Feedback on website designs!

Over the weekend I asked people for feedback on my prototypes for the website.
Here is the first prototype design:



The feed back I received on it was that it was too basic and boring. So therefore I went back to the drawing board and was inspired by Alice in wonderland eat me, drink me. I decided to have a bookshelf as a background and have one book animated with a tag that says read me on it. When the user clicks on it, a window will pop up with the video on it.
Here is rough design of what I have so far. I created it in Dreamweaver.

Feedback on presentation

There are a few key factors that I need to work on for future presentations:

1. Use images in my PowerPoint.
2. Change the layout of the slides so they are not all the same.
3. Design the layout myself. Do not use PowerPoint's templates.
4. Less text.
5. Practise and learn my script off for my presentations.
6. Only bring up flash cards with key words on them and put them down on the table. Don't hold them in your hand.

Website Design

In order to make this project interactive, I must place my video on a web page. After researching multiple websites that are aimed for children, I was inspired by the club penguin home page. On their home page if you click on one of the penguins a projector pops up and the video plays on it. Therefore for my website design( which is for International children's book day) I wanted to start with a library book shelf. One of the books will look slightly different to the others and it will have a tag with "Read me" written on it. The tag was inspired by Alice in wonderland children's book. When you click on the "read me" tag a white square with the video on it will pop up. You can press play then and close the pop up.

Feedback and start of prototype 2

I got feedback on my first design of the environment from others and the main thing they said was that it was a bit large. As in the walls and room space was too large for the avatar. After hearing the feedback I rescaled the walls so it has a realistic size to them. I also rearranged some of the corridors. It's not complete yet but the architecture design is nearly complete. I just need to delete some of the walls from the original design. One feedback on the water room was that it wasn't realistic enough. Creating natural objects ( I.e. Snow, water, sand, grass, etc) is quite difficult to make. Therefore I changed that room design to walking on water. I've thrown in a few particles to try and hide the walls. I will be adding more design elements and objects to the environment but it is a start.