Interactive storytelling group

Hi there!

What we have done/Challenges encountered

What we have done this week, until now, is to continue our research of how to develop our Be Detective idea and try to find a solid concept of how we think it will work. But our research has not been to a lot of help though we feel uninspired and don’t really know how to move forward with our concept. We were too focused on integrating the feedback we got from the mid-crit session which made us more confused. That is why we now have chosen to kill our darling and are focusing on a whole new concept idea which we all feel much more comfortable and stoked to work with.

Here is the motivation of why we chose to kill our first idea:

• Our idea will not work in the long term. There is theory and research that states gamification only works in a limited period of time and after that the user doesn't care anymore, we want to create something that has a longer life span.
• The idea was to old and already out there. We want to come up with something new, innovative and futuristic that does not exist today or has existed for the last couple of 15 years..
• We want to create something with a reality approach. Our idea has until now only had fictional aspects and the only reality approach was the surroundings.  
• The storytelling is not modern and innovative enough.
• We had a hard time understanding and developing the interaction aspect. How would the user interact with witnesses, clues etc.
• The concept was not solid enough.

Changes in the project

To start with, what we actually plans to keep from our detective idea is the technique. We still wanna use, augmented reality lenses or glasses other than that the concept is completely changed. Our new concept underlines creativity, interaction, entertainment and visualization in a whole new way by taking the “going out for dinner” experience to a whole new food sensational level. This concept focuses on creating a restaurant business experience you’ve never seen or heard of before. By interacting with your food, a story associated to the food  appears in front of you (like a movie) using augmented reality. By eating different things from the plates, will add happenings to the storyline. You can also manipulate the story happening on the dinner table. For example if an unexpected guest in the form of a fly appears, just wave it away with your hands or cut the flower that is growing to high, with a simple scissor motion with your fingers! A custom made database of events/happenings, characters and emotions will be created in association to the specific menu.  When you for example eat a tomato a visualization develops on your restaurant table where you can see the whole time lapse from when the tomato started to grow until it’s mature and ready to be eaten. If you eat several ingredients at the same time, for example meat, potatoes and salad, a integration of all your ingredients will appear on the table in an artistic manner. By chewing your food slow, the development of the visualization process will move slower and if you chew fast, the visions you see will appear faster. You decide the story. The whole visualization experience depends on your food and how fast you eat it. Going out for dinner is a social activity, and we want it to stay that way, an integration of all your companions visions will blur together into one. When your plate is empty, you have a fullsize story in front of you that you’ve made yourself depending on what food you have eaten. It’s like going to the movies except that you are the one creating and deciding how the story will look like, depending on what food you are eating and how you’ll eat it. Because the food is organic and locally produced, there will only be positive images creating.

What we will do

We now have a solid concept we want to develop further. We will continue to research more in the area linked between food experience and augmented reality. So far, we have not encountered any concepts similar to ours. But with e.g. augmented reality glasses we think this can be possible to execute in the future. We are focusing on the final presentation and how to make our concept as clear as possible. Though we have our solid concept already developed, we need to discuss which approach we want to have. We still have some ideas of how we can integrate food with a visual experience. Do we want to visualize our food with pictures, abstract colors, feelings, cooperation between the dinner guests,cultural aspects or a mix of them? We also need to state how the exact integration will be like.

Resources

Here's an images of how we visualize the experience: