An old post now with even more comic strippiness
Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 11:23AM One of my favorite posts on Note the Smile is Play, Comic Strips, and Enhancing Gesture-Based Human Computer Interfaces (it’s more fun to read than its title). In it I talk about the interrelation of gestural human computer interfaces and play. I sketched out a fun project embodying the ideas. That project relied heavily on the visual language of comics.
Since I wrote that post, I’ve read the book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art1 by Scott McCloud. Among many other fascinating points, McCloud makes a compelling case for the appeal and power of the abstractions within comic books (graphic novels, if you prefer). Specifically, he believes that abstract depictions of people — especially faces — in comics cause readers to identify with the story as characters in the story. This sparked an idea to revise the project I previously described.
One of the big challenges of the system I outlined was feeding live video of participants back to themselves augmented with thought balloons and other visual elements of comics. The larger the display grows (bigger is better for this experience) the more offset the video camera capturing the images must be. This introduces perspective angles much different than the desired straight-on mirror effect in the final video (i.e. an undesired parallax effect and an extreme version of the eye contact issues in teleconferencing systems). Reading McCloud led to inspiration: instead of live video mixed with the elements of comics, interpret the whole scene as a comic strip, abstracting people and faces in the video to comic strip depictions. Not only does this solve the perspective issue, it opens up further possibilities to explore how people engage the interface with a range of abstract representations of themselves — from stick figures to near photo-realistic.
Whether I ever build out this project is another matter entirely.
1 A tremendously cool book I can’t say enough good things about. This post on McCloud’s writing was my first introduction to him.
