Violet Disruption

Designers: Bea Gatchalian, Kiesha Mundin, Kyle Cheng, Leon Zussner, Ava Shepherd

Brief

For our second brief on the collaborative unit, our goal was to design a way for people to embody and enact the outer appearance of a digital avatar; Violet Disruption.

Violet disruption is the image of self liberation and power. As a digital superhero her goal is to help survivors of sexual assault through the power of electronic music and dance. “Music is a universal language, and for some it acts as a way to connect even more deeply with a narrative.” (Brud, cited in The fortyfive, 2020)

After receiving this brief, we had a group discussion and agreed that we wanted to focus on trying to combine the digital and physical appearances of violet. We saw this as a good opportunity to explore some technology we had never experimented with before and see what we can create.

Spark AR:

Following our phone call, Bea sent us this video showing what she had quickly made using Spark AR. Spark AR is a software that she had previous experience using and thought it could be an interesting tool for our group to explore. We were all really excited by this idea and loved what Bea had created. We therefore agreed to use this to recreate a version of violet and build an Avatar.

Video of Bea and the helmet she designed

The next day we met at LCC and Bea taught us how to use the software. She taught me how to create new designs and set up the motion tracking software. This was really interesting for me as I have never worked with any software like this so was eager to learn.

Learning how to use Spark AR

Once I was up to speed with Spark AR I helped edit our shapes for the avatar and add some shadows and highlights to give the suit some more depth. I additionally made a duplicate of our pink suit in green so that we could have two variations of Violet depending on what the user felt suited them best.

Adding highlights and tidying the shapes

Finally we were able to get Spark AR up and running on our laptops with effective motion tracking. While the suit was able to detect the main parts of the human body we noticed that it struggled to follow smaller features such and hands and feet.

Testing the avatar on my laptop

At this point considering our software was already starting to come together and work how we imaged. We decided to stick with this idea as our creation of the digital avatar. We thought that combining this with a customisable superhero suit in the physical world it could be an interesting project about liberation and self expression.

"Hyper-presence, can be used to express otherwise abstract emotions or behaviours" Bailenson (2006, p.3).

Once we had the software running we wanted to see how well it continues to track our movements in different lighting conditions. We decided that the best way to present on Friday would be to use a projector so that we can easily track peoples movements while still showing it on a large scale for everyone to interact with.

Kiesha Dancing in low light

Testing in brighter light dancing

After these videos we noticed some inconsistency with the tracking when in low light and have fast movements. This is something we wanted to clean up before the final performance.

Costumes

Finally on Thursday we made the costumes for Kiesha and Leon to wear in the final performance. The inspiration was to illustrate how often people feel very shy dancing in front of others (represented by harsh shapes full of rice). However, through the empowerment of violet they will feel lighter while dancing and shed all anxiety.

Creating the costumes

Final Performance

Video of our final experience (Original footage by Dany Garcia-Solano)

Feedback

We received very mixed feedback for our work. While people generally enjoyed the experience and thought our VR was very cool, people struggled to understand how everything tided together. Generally people were confused about the costumes Leon and Kiesha were wearing and did not know why that was combined with the digital avatar.

Reflections / moving forward

This brief taught me a lot about collaboration. One thing that our team struggled with this week was understanding when to stop and take a step back. Everyone in the group brought a strong and varied skill set to the team. However, this was our greatest downfall. Instead of narrowing down on one idea and perfecting it, we spread ourselves wide and ended up with several unfinished elements trying to work together at once. It was not until the final presentation that we were able to notice this.

This was a real learning point for me as it really illustrated to me the importance of knowing when to take step back from your work and get rid of ideas that may not be best suited for the brief even if they are strong ideas. I believe our project could have been 10x better if we got rid of one or two extra elements and focused on one more in depth. This is something I will take with me and try to apply in all future work.

Next Post: Macro UX Unit

References:

Bailenson, J.N. and Beall, A.C., 2006. Transformed social interaction: Exploring the digital plasticity of avatars. In Avatars at work and play (pp. 1-16). Springer, Dordrecht.

https://thefortyfive.com/opinion/post-pandemic-pop-and-the-rise-of-the-digital-avatar/