Woyzeck

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Interface Design

The design of the physical installation space and the designs for the scenes with tangible interfaces have evolved continuously throughout the development of the project. Initially, Woyzeck was conceived as an outdoor installation at Fort York, a historic site in Toronto from the same era as Büchner's script. The idea was to set Woyzeck at the fort, with scenes located in AR reconstructions of original buildings now missing from the site. Appendix F has a collection of the concept art I developed throughout the process of creating this project. Figure 1 shows concept art for this initial vision. For the tangible interfaces, I had planned to work with AR tracking using fiducials, a black and white pattern recognition system, as well as other technologies such as a traditional computer and mouse. None of these technologies are present in the final design. Figures 2 and 3 show concept art from this stage of the design process for the tangible interface scenes. Through further development, it became clear that the AR technology to which I would have access was not advanced enough to work well outdoors. Additionally, there are many factors outside relating to lighting, moisture, and weather conditions that would affect hardware and could be easily controlled by mounting the project indoors in a lab space.

At this point I revised the project for indoor installation in the York University Future Cinemas Lab space. Figure 5 shows the concept art from this stage in the design. Next I created an online HTML interactive demo for Woyzeck as a final project for Professors Caitlin Fisher's and Janine Marchessault's course Future Cinemas. Figures 6 through 20 show the art developed for this demo. As production neared, several difficulties became apparent in my designs. To project a map image on the floor of the installation space it would be necessary to use multiple projectors housed in the grid. The grid also had to house the delicate tracking sensors. It became clear that the calibration of the projectors would be difficult and their presence in the grid could cause problems for the tracking hardware. I therefore chose to redesign the map as part of the paper program audience members would receive when entering the installation and cut the floor projections entirely.

Another difficulty that came up as we approached production was the design of the sensors in the tangible interfaces. These objects were originally designed to house small sensors that would react to the audience member's actions. Upon further investigation it became clear that wireless sensors were not available, and wired sensors would be difficult to integrate into the system controlling the rest of the installation. For these reasons I redesigned the tangible interfaces as objects with no technology embedded in them at all. Instead, I have used the capabilities of the Intersense tracking grid and accompanying sensors worn by the audience member. I took all the technology out of the objects and reduced the number of sensors needed to the two worn by the audience member; the head tracking sensor and a hand tracking sensor.