Information
Julian Oliver >
»Level Head«, 2007 - 2007
Co-Workers & Funding:
# This game began with a project called Unprepared Architecture co-designed with Simone Jones, programmed and modeled by myself as part of Interactivos, Media Lab Prado, Madrid, June 2007.
While containing no game-play or avatar, Unprepared Architecture will continue to be developed as an experiment in augmenting architecture on a site-specific basis.
http://selectparks.net/~julian/levelhead/
Technology
Software
# levelHead deploys three small (5x5x5cm) plastic cubes with a unique image (marker) on each face. A computer running the Linux operating system is fitted with a Sony EyeToy camera sitting on a clean white surface. Computer Vision software on the host computer is trained to recognise the marker such that it can overlay 3D content on a per-face basis. This software has been designed to produce the convincing impression that each room is somehow inside the cube.
Further software provides an animation management facility for the character model: by analysing tilt movements across two axes, the character can be directed to turn and walk in a given direction.
Descriptions & Essays
levelHead is a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver.
levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors.
In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.
Some doors lead nowhere and will send the character back to the room they started in, a trick designed to challenge the player's spatial memory. Which doors belong to which rooms?
There are three cubes (levels) in total, each of which are connected by a single door. Players have the goal of moving the character from room to room, cube to cube in an attempt to find the final exit door of all three cubes. If this door is found the character will appear to leave the cube, walk across the table surface and vanish.. The game then begins again.
Someone once said levelHead may have something to do with a story from Borges.. For a description of the conceptual basis of this project, see below.
Literature
Oliver, Julian. »Perceptual Play: Optical Illusion Art as Radical Interface.« .
Oliver, Julian. »The Game is Not the Medium ... or "How To Ignore the Shiny Box"?.« .
Oliver, Julian. »Buffering Bergson: Matter and Memory in 3D Games.« .
Oliver, Julian. »The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space.« In Computer Gambes and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, edited by . : Tampere University Press, 2002.
Julian Oliver. »Polygon Destinies: The Production of Place in the Digital Role-Playing
Game.« In COSIGN 2001 Conference Proceedings, edited by . Melbourne Victoria, Australia: Julian Holland Oliver Interactive Information Institute RMIT University,, 2000.
Exhibitions & Events