Hello again from Kotodama Fruit Juice!
It’s been an extremely productive week at KFJ HQ (Kotodama Fruit Juice Headquarters). Heather and Dilara were able to talk with Peter Kinney further about our Kinect Wrapper plans, and after we were sufficiently warned away, we decided to scope back and use only the MSRE and a microphone to do our speech recognition.
Other options on the table were to use mobile platforms and the android SDK, or use Dragon Naturally Speaking, but the advantages of having a grammar parser built into the Microsoft speech product eliminate so much development on our part that it’s almost impossible to move away from with such a short window to produce content.
Speaking of content, we were able to decide on a character. No, seriously. We did.
Here’s how it happened:
Step 1) Momo designed a veritable crap-ton of characters for us to interact with:
Step 2) We narrowed it down to three creatures we felt like, as a team, we could build compelling activities around:
These three characters all had pluses and minuses for us as a group, but the third character was quickly eliminated and we decided to settle on the first two so that we could move forward.
Complications and planning have kept two characters alive, because if we are unable to acquire the requisite rigging for our model of the first character, we will be unable to animate it in ways that allow for lifelike, body-language-based communication. The robot solves a lot of these problems, but is a compromise on many levels.
Our project is beginning to coalesce around the ideas of communicating to a being that doesn’t have a perfect grasp on language. The goal is to provide a realistic set of expectations and experiences for the guest who is participating, and a “dumb” virtual actor, in our case a sack of meat (not a zombie!), allows us to control the scope of the world we are building.
This weekend we are finishing our branding tasks, including a logo and a poster, and next week is 1/4s already! It’s been a crazy ride for us, but the research and flexibility is beginning to pay off and a feasible product is over the horizon.
I’ll leave you with a preview of our poster… not final, that’s for sure!
