Roy Block is a project by Sebastian Schmieg, student at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. It was developed during Prof.Olia Lialina's seminar “Buttons and Bubbles” which focused on the topic of interfaces. At the same time it is Sebastian's prediploma.
Roy Block is an experiment, sort of game, with a tangible interface that touches the field of mixed reality. The game features a self-willed heroine who is trying to get from the very left to the very right of the screen without touching the bottom and dying. However there is nothing she can stand and jump on so she needs the player to help her.
The player has two small wooden blocks, in each hand one. Pressed on the screen they are being recognised by the game and the heroine can jump on them. To make the game even more challenging there are hazardous flower-like enemies who try to destroy the heroine when she comes too close.
An integral part of the game – leaving aside the enemies we can call it the environment – is put into the player's hands and becomes the interface. This transformation leads to an almost seamless transition of physical and virtual challenge. On one side the pressure of time as well as the enemies require quick but thoughtful movements while on the other side it is quite hard to always put the blocks at the desired position without getting with one hand in the way of the other hand. At the same time it isn't about the right position only as, depending on the blocks' angle, the heroine might lose her balance and fall down.
Is it a game?
“You call it a game?”, my professor interrupted me when I was talking about my project as just that, a game. Of course she was right and, although I am using the term “game” throughout the website, it is an experiment that borrows elements of gaming to get people to try out the interface and also to give them a motivation to observe other people using it.
Roy Block leaves out the aspect of narration altogether. There's no story and there are no levels. In the beginning I thought that enemies which are initialized randomly but are aware of the heroine would make for enough of a challenge but it turned out that at least different levels of difficulty would be good.
Aesthetics
The visual style is very simplistic. I did not see the need for photo realism. Instead I focused on implementing a realistic physics engine. Although the heroine is even missing any arms her movement and behaviour looks human-like. And just through this behaviour we attribute human characteristics to her.
Furthermore a lot of effort went into the interaction of heroine and block so that the user gets the impression that the heroine is really standing on the block in his hands.
It is not a black box, it is D.I.Y.
Usually even student works strive for professionalism. So did I when I thought about how the project could be presented. To save money and to keep everything simple I used a lot of things that one can find at home: cardboard boxes (one form our vacuum cleaner), infrared healing lamps or aluminum foil. For the presentation I wanted to hide everything behind cloth or in a box. That's how you do it, you put everything into a black, or nowadays Apple-white, box and it looks “professional”. But I lacked the time – fortunately.
The project is D.I.Y. and why should I hide that. Visitors to our final presentation/exhibition were very interested in how the project works and thanks to the openness it was fairly easy to explain. Furthermore people were attracted by all the stuff and tried to make out what everything was good for. One woman even asked me if there were animals breeding in one the boxes that were equipped with healing lamps.
Future Development
Currently no further development is planned. However should an opportunity arise – an exhibition or festival – then I would like to work on the two following ideas:
Expanding the blocks' functionality
After I had presented my work to the whole seminar, Dragan Espenschied
had the idea of assigning each side of a block a different function. Not tracking only one but all sides of a block,
each side with a different marker, would increase a block's functionality from one to potentially six functions.
Assigning each side of a block a different function and combining this with level designs that required to
use different functions would take the gaming aspect of the project to another level. Also the focus on the blocks as
being the interface and the core of the project would increase.
Scaling up
I would like to make this thing bigger. The projection could be as big as a wall with the blocks being scaled up accordingly. This could lead to another aspect which I had to leave out of my project although I think it is interesting, especially in the field of interfaces: collaboration. With blocks so big that you needed both hands to hold one you would have to play together with a second person.