Interactive Story Telling Project

Interactive Story Telling Project

Virtual Reality with Stories
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For the Interactive Story Telling Class we had to do a Project. There were 5 in the Project and one dropped out from the class. Four of us discussed several ideas and settled for a Project based on Myths like "The Myth of the American Dream" or "The Myths About the Origin of the World" in various Cultures etc. As one of the team members has worked in the Amazon and was actively working on some exibits related to Amazon we choose to do the project related to "Myths from the Amazon", "Myths from the Africa", "Myths from the India", and "Myths from the Australia" as a comparison of how the Myths varied on a specific topic (Origins of World) from different regions of the World. We wanted to tie this up some how to Google Earth.

As our discussions went by we decided to start with "Myths from the Amazon" as this will help us show our work in a near by Museum, where one of the Project team member was about to present her work with the Amazon tribes. One of the Class Mates, Ed, showed us some interesting things about Virtual Reality. This facinated us and hence we decided to tie our "Myths from the Amazon Interactive Story Telling" Project with Virtual Reality. So Google Earth was off the Project for now.

Amazon Queen a member of the team who worked in the Amazon gave the Myths for the Project.
Esme, well versed in literature, arts, ornament design, puppet making, effeciently created the story books for the Myth, markers for VR and "Story Board" for the Project.
Max who was good at creating beautiful pictures and Scenes created beautiful pictures using Photshop for the Project.
We started using BuildAR (A tool for Virtual Reality -VR) as our Classmate Ed used BuildAR to demonstrate VR. As we found BuildAR crashed often and did not have many aspects of what we wanted, I hunted the web for various alternative SW for VR and found FLARToolkit and FLARManager.So we decided to do the VR aspects of the Project with FLARManager that uses FLARToolkit and Adobe Flex.

As we could not afford to purchase SW, our motto was to use Open Source free SW as much as possible. Our course teacher, Arturo an expert in Movies and Games, suggested we use FlashBuild as an alternative to Adobe Flex.So after searching the web for solutions and how to, I was able to get the basic VR for our Project. With this Intro, in the next few Blogs I like to share how the various pieces came together.

-Suresh