C0M-3T

BEHIND THE IDEA

The final project for Designing Club Culture required me to team up with @natayie and @lolliechloe to create a cohesive nightclub environment. The concept for our club was simple: an intergalactic discotheque. We kept the story behind our environment vague so as to not confuse people, but when conceptualizing the space we thought of our club as living onboard an intergalactic spaceship and we even designed the tickets for our club to resemble airplane boarding passes.

EXECUTION

Fairly early on we settled on playing disco/funky music in our club, but we didn’t spend a ton of time thinking about music. In fact, we only started putting our music together about a day before our final performance. That being said we decided to spend most of our time thinking about what people would do inside our club. We knew that we wanted to build some interactive elements and after brainstorming for several days, decided on an idea that we all really loved. That idea involved creating an on-screen avatar that could be controlled by audience members. The avatar would appear to be an astronaut so as to fit within the theme of our club. To further enhance the interactivity, we also set out to build a physical control panel that audience members could use to control the color and intensity of the lighting on the screen. Both of these elements were where I focused a lot of my time on this project. The on-screen avatar was built inside Unreal Engine by using the Neo Kinect plugin, while the control panel was built using an Arduino that communicated with Unreal Engine via OSC.

On the day of our final performance I was unsure if the Microsoft Kinect would perform well in low light with a lot of people in the room. However, upon final testing everything seemed to work really well. By this point as well, Chloe had created an introduction for our performance that I was able to add to the Unreal project and sync up with the audio. Both of the interactive elements seemed to be a big hit with our fellow classmates as seen in the video above!