Week 5 - Silk Road

Explore More Potential Interactions

As our drumming idea was encouraged by participants last week, we hoped to incorporate more objects with physical interaction into our project. We started to seek more exhibits from V&A which could be coded into interactive objects (Figure 1). However, we needed to balance technology, time and items (from ancient Asia) at the same time. This has greatly limited the viability of our design.

Possible interactive objects grid, organized by Sylvester

Surprisingly, Sanya has managed to release an AR experience of a Chinese Vase that allows users to place a 3d model anywhere in their places, which is a way to connect the virtuality with the reality, the museum with the home.

An AR porcelain, designed by Sanya

During the tutorial, we showed our new progress on Mozilla hubs which were using links to jump into different scenarios in hubs and jump out of the hubs to interact with objects on other websites. John seemed confused why we were splitting our work into 2 parts and suggested we focus on storytelling to make the exploration process coherent and cohesive.

Create A Story

An interesting backstory and scene-building often attract a wider audience. We urgently needed to create a script that could be embedded in our concept. Sylvester proposed a Silk Road journey that received votes from all of us: A merchant sells antiques from China to India then spreads the culture he learns in India back to China. Simultaneously, he built the foundational scenes containing a Chinese ancient town and an Indian temple which set the key tone for our subsequent design.

Maritime Silk Road Storyboards by Sylvester

Basic scene building by Sylvester

Beyond that, Ines and I edited the story into steps and designed instructions with texts and images for guiding audiences.

Storyline by Svaney Instructions by Ines

Spacial Design

Besides, space design has been a shortcoming for us due to technical constraints. We tried to set the scene to a more immersive experience. So I decorated the interior by matching the appropriate open-sourced models from Sketch Fab and the V&A collections. For the exterior area, I placed guideboards for visual navigating in the space and a notice board contains the information of Silk Road for introducing the intention of this journey. Although the results were not as good as expected, these adjustments provided clues for exploration and increase the completion to some extent.

Spacial adjustments by Svaney

Presentation & Reflection

The fourth presentation seemed much more relaxed, as we have sorted out the main story and have made a significant leap in spatial modelling. However, people were looking forward see more possibilities of multi-player interaction in this design. Jack suggested that we start doing user testing in order to identify our target group and improve details.

Recoding by Ines