Tagged: coding
Some thoughts on AR Poetry
For those who knew me before Critical Lit Games will know that I’ve loved writing and performing poetry. It’s a way for me to get thoughts out in writing without having to necessarily frame it in the same way as I would for prose like short stories or novellas (or plays, for that matter). Critical Lit Games was initially a way of blending text based, poetry and immersive mediums together – I then developed (and am still developing as we speak) an AR Gamebook, going back to prose and gaming elements.
Since Lens Studio came out, the idea of creating quick literary experiences really appealed to me. With something as popular as Snapchat, these codes could be easily distributed and experienced in a short period of time. It also led me to think of what AR really is and how poetry could benefit from it.
From someone who has published poetry online and in book form, as well as performing spoken word, it’s interesting to see where AR could fit within this spectrum of form. I’m all for poetry shared in a myriad of ways – print books, Instagram, physical and online stages, brick walls, napkins etc. and it’s about finding the strength of the medium to really unlock its unique potential.
So… long story short. AR Poetry can be a new form of framing.
Performance strives in the present. When we are physically within the space, you drink in the atmosphere; experiencing the senses first hand (as much as we technically can) – sights, sounds, touch, smells. There is a commitment, an investment to go to a live performance (especially nowadays) and this is the payoff. There is a reason where live events will be timeless and always a part of our lives, no matter what technology we have.
Recorded poetry, in video and book form, is about preservation. You can connect to someone in the past, whether it’s from a few hours ago to centuries ago. You can savour the words over and over again as they were laid down. It is posterity, a legacy, which found its home in you.
Augmented reality poetry can thrive in its framing. It creates meaning in its attachment to the surrounding area. For example, I wrote a poem for a daily commute to be used on someone’s route to work, school or college – seeing the journey in a new way. I wrote a poem for the snow (another form of augmented reality) It provides a commentary based on your experience in the present, but recorded in the past. You can embody the words; walk through them, reach out and touch them, sit down next to them. I would love to see people with the snap code film it in their life, seeing how the same frame can co-exist in so many realities. Maybe it’s a hybrid form?
Another thing I’m working on is the audio input: where the reading/recording can activate on proximity to the words. Maybe there can be a sense of participation on the receiver’s end, where they can “rearrange” the poem in terms of voice?
There’s a lot to think about and work out – that’s why I love it so much!
Feel free to share your thoughts with me – I’d love a discussion on this! I have made a new Instagram for my AR Poetry, so you can try out the Snapcodes there!
Of course, there’s always my Snapchat – search for @criticallitgames!
Suzie
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The History of the Bookmark
As I’ve been developing and designing a range of AR Bookmarks (or what I call the Book.AR.k), why not share the history of such a universal and practically timeless gadget from its conception? In this post, I will trace its story from its physical to its digital form!
Humble Beginnings
Bookmarks can be traced back further than we might think – with indications that bookmarks first emerged in the 1st century AD as an accompaniment to codices. Codices, plural of codex, (coming from the Latin caudex – meaning block of wood, which also could be used in a pejorative way i.e. blockhead!) were books made of paper/vellum/papyrus with its contents handwritten.
In Egypt, near Sakkara, the earliest bookmark was found – dating from 6th Century AD and made of ornamented leather.
In later centuries, when you consider the rarity of the earliest print books, it makes sense that they would want to protect them from physical wear and tear – and the bookmark could freely mark any page the reader wanted without doing so. Queen Elizabeth I was one of the first to own a bookmark (or “bookmarker”) by the Queen’s Printer, Christopher Barker. The bookmark in question was fringed with silk.
By the 1880s, the woven silk bookmarks were becoming replaced with the stiff paper and cardboard versions that we’d be more familiar with today.
Nowadays, many styles of bookmark are available – made in either metal, cardboard, fabric or plush. They can come in many shapes and sizes – even in a clip or magnetic form.
From Physical to Digital
Bookmarking functions can be found in every browser today, but the first design for a digital bookmark actually preceded the World Wide Web. Craig Cockburn proposed a touchscreen device called a PageLink in 1989 – similar to a hybrid of an ebook reader/browser. His patent, although applied for, was never produced.
Instead, it was the browser Mosaic 1.0 in 1993 that popularised the type of digital bookmark that we know today – called a Hotlist. It would change colour depending on whether the link had been visited before – tracking the history of where the person browsed.
Nowadays, due to the heavy use of mobile phones, bookmarks are often synched between device and laptop/computer, enabling a consistent presence of searched and curated information.
So why the Bookm.AR.k?
When designing the Book.AR.k, I put forward the most important question – what does mixed reality add to the experience? If a physical bookmark has AR content, what helps and what hinders its original function – to mark the place of the reader?
If we go back to the precious nature of the printed book and the need to preserve it, attitudes have changed since then. We can sometimes be accused of folding our book corners in lieu of a bookmark, as well as scribbling in the margins.
So why not have clear notes that are linked to the bookmark? Why not integrate a digital system – one that autosaves and stands the test of time of wear/tear, and stays in one consistent place?
I’ll have another page, depicting all of the bookmarks in the range (plus one I’m extremely excited about, the specialised D&D edition) in a lot more detail.
I hope you enjoyed this rather different post!
Suzie
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Pocket Games Connect @ Helsinki!
This is a little overdue – I went to Helsinki for the first time just over a month ago – but I thought I would type out my experience as it was one of many firsts. Not only was I doing my first Indie pitch, but it was also the first time I’d taken a plane by myself and the first time I’d been to Finland!
First of all, everyone was exceedingly helpful. It doesn’t take much for me to get lost in London – a place I’ve lived in for 30 years – so you can imagine the amount of times I found myself looking around aimlessly on my phone. The taxi system was great – it was easy to identify your car by the bright yellow cabs with giant numbers on top! The app was really straightforward to – perfect to get from my room to the venue.
Once I got in, it was time to get my badge, get set up and get chatting!
What’s especially great about these events is the feeling of connecting over something you’ve created, especially when you’ve been locked away in a vacuum of your own thoughts for so long whilst making it. It was awesome to see Coming Home playing across the screens too!
I loved the fact that many people had been gamebook enthusiasts in their youth and liked the idea of adding something new to its table. The judges were also friendly and full of wisdom – it wasn’t as nerve-wracking as I thought it would be to pitch and explain the game to them (the fear was out of potential technical difficulties with the AR to be honest!)
The feedback I got was invaluable, especially for someone who hasn’t been in the game that long (pardon the pun) – I’ve been working on it a lot since I landed back in London and can’t wait to take part again!
Thank you to Simon Aubrey Drake for this awesome event and all of the organisers, judges, attendees and speakers!
Suzie
Introducing Coming Home – a video!
So we filmed a brief outline video of how Coming Home, our interactive AR novel, works along with the app and as a stand alone piece. Thanks go to Jorge Ba-oh for editing (he runs a neat T-shirt business called TeeChu, selling geek and gamer merch!)
Hope you enjoy it! x
Update: VRUK: Fest!
First of all – hope you all are well!
From the 6th-7th July, I exhibited Coming Home at VRUK Fest – the very first time exhibiting! It was a whole cocktail of emotions – but the sweetness was the overwhelming flavour.
My background has been in theatre – and something that always worried me was whether I dropped props. I was a little secure when it was myself and gravity – throw other things into the mix and the fear of me messing up would go up a degree!
I realised it was definitely the case when displaying something I had written and coded!
However, it worked – not 100% accurate, but workable for a demo – which I was so happy about! Everyone was so understanding, attentive and I met some incredible people who taught me so much and gave me food for present and future thought!
The feedback was great too – and it was definitely to work on presentation and the way the book is laid out. My mind has been fully entrenched with language and words – but not necessarily where they lie or where they could be positioned to bring out the full potential of the AR extension. I’ve been sketching up some ideas since then – and I can’t wait to show them to you!
The people, demos and talks gave me so much inspiration and motivation in a relatively new field of opportunities – there’s a lot of things to prove and a lot of things to develop. It seems the most exciting time for this technology to develop on its own merit as well as to rejuvenate and/or transform existing media. I feel very privileged to be a part of it.
Thank you to RaveInnovate and VRUmbrella for giving me this opportunity!
Suzie
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Mind the Gap – AR books pt.2
Long time no see! It’s been a while since the last blog post, so it’s time for another instalment of Mind the Gap! This post in particular will refer to the work I’m doing on the Coming Home series – if you want to know more on the project, here’s the link. I’ll be doing some dev logs on the site very soon.
AR had a profound effect on me when it came to disrupting or stifling presence – that it could make its mark on the moment unlike the “soma-esque” escapism of VR. AR feels like the technological manifestation of when a memory is tagged onto a particular place or object, and it could be used for a myriad of purposes. It can write or try to rewrite a connection to something you may see everyday in a much more explicit way than other methods.
Because of that, I wanted to be very careful when preparing an AR book.
I love books, like a lot of people. I escaped a lot in books, stories and characters during my childhood and teenage years to this day (though nowhere as near as much as before) – so in order to augment a medium that wants the consumer to fill in the gaps with their own imagination, the overlay has to be painted with a light hand.
So with Coming Home – a mixture of prose and free form poetry – there had to be a lot of balancing. The AR had to add something, for sure, but I didn’t want it to act as a distraction from the words that were already there. The cover was the simple part.
But what about the printed words themselves? Would there be only pictorial representations of the words, or would there be other parts of the story through words and sounds?
The solution finally came to me – the idea of multiple narratives in AR.
It’s been done so many times in regular novels – with either the strength of the voice or the typography marking out each character.
This time, however, there could be as many as you wanted (within reason), by selecting a character at the beginning of the book – the reactions to one main text changing, depending on who was chosen.
In this way, not only would there be a standalone book, but the AR would add depth rather than the whole story. There’ll also be some bonus content (spoilers!).
I’ll be writing more about how the book design goes and any news for demos (an interesting idea for an AR book – we’ll tell you when we find a solution) both here and on the Coming Home site!
Suzie x
Mind the Gap – Figuring it All Out pt.1
I’ve been thinking about this since I started writing – and it’s something that’s informed most of my writing life over different mediums.
I feel as though I’ve had my fingers in a lot of literary pies – I’ve written novellas, short stories, plays, poems and even a screenplay (as part of my MA Creative Writing module) and it’s very much like learning a different language.
This comes with the difficulty of “translating” or “transposing” a narrative from one form to another.
Each mode has its constraints and its own way to be creative – and of course, this varies in opinion. Here’s one example: my PhD thesis on Science Fiction Theatre argued the importance of dialogue and performance in world building as opposed to the visual detail of film.
It’s a nice coincidence that it’s National Poetry Month in April, as I’ve been figuring out how to fill in or stretch out gaps when poetry is transposed to a digital/virtual/augmented medium.
I’ve said in one of my Instagram posts that: “Poetry is not the breadcrumb of narrative/But the bird who pecks at it and disturbs the trail”.
There are many ways in which poetry is consumed, taking into account the oral playground of sounds and rhythms in performance poetry to the way the words sit upon the page, either highlighting presence or absence by its negative space.
So how can it work digitally?
It’s not a new phenomenon, by any means. Digital poets from Theo Lutz to Stephanie Strickland, Jason Nelson, Loss Pequeño Glazier and many more have been doing this for a while. It allows for a different kind of interactivity, of dissemination, of understanding. I’ll talk more about this on a future blog.
Virtual Reality’s hallmarks appear to be presence and immersion, two things I touched upon in my PhD in a theatrical sense. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Artonin Artaud mentions the illusory nature of theatre as “la réalité virtuelle” in 1938. With constraints comes a different form of creativity – and VR is no exception, particularly when in its relative infancy as an art form.
Every piece of art lends not only a different way of viewing the world, but a way of conversing with the audience. It should, in my opinion, leave space for the reader to interact: from leaving a message in a virtual arena to creating a unique interpretation from a line of printed or spoken poetry.
There’s a video that Barry Kramer (from the Game Grumps) made that illustrates this idea exceptionally well when it comes to video game design:
So, long story short (the old fashioned way of TL:DR) – I’ve been trying to figure out the balance of telling and showing, that old chestnut.
Can VR poetry just be slabs of text pasted on a photo-realistic environment? I’m not too sure on that. There has to be a connect, for the pieces to fit together rather than hastily arranged. It has to mesh somehow in a way that feels intuitive.
Hello How Are You is VR because you’re inhabiting different people’s perspectives and what they wish to see (or not see) in the world. As we interact with a train of thought/conversation, we get linked to a particular character and get led down their rabbit hole of being. The words either follow or movement or become part of the scenery according to their wishes.
The game isn’t photorealistic by any means – and that is to reflect how they are building themselves into the reality, much like myself creating this environment. You get to see it develop and change over time, just like the words and sounds.
In the next blog, I’ll be talking about the AR poetry books I’ve been developing and how it can add rather than distract from the reading experience (here’s hoping!).
Suzie
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Then Vs. Now pt.1
Critical Lit Games is a fascinating project for me in many ways – as outlined in my last blog, I’ve always wanted to write and to code: I remember those days in silent reading in class where I’d whip out a C++ manual and read quietly in primary school.
Now, almost 21 years later (an attempt to remember my age here), I’m back to learning how to code and create games/applications/environments – and it feels like a lot has changed.
A caveat: there’s been a huge temporal and knowledge gap between these two ages for me – I’ve always been a self taught person.
What I always remember is a lot of books.
Books, manuals, diagrams, screengrabs…a lot of printed information that I was always excited to try out.
Anyone remember this series? Anything with a CD attached would excite me so much, knowing that there was a treasure trove of codes I could access on a screen as well as a page.
The first language I had a stab at learning was BASIC (or more specifically, Q Basic), so there was a lot of monochromatic DOS screens and text based commands. After doing my homework, I’d try to plug in a few commands and numbers to see how it worked – in fact, I pretty much taught myself what variables were – once I found out you had to put numbers in its place, everything lit up for me. I was 9 at the time but that moment is still really important to me!
That’s when I wanted to become a programmer because, in my mind, this was the person who “made” games. Like all people starting off at anything, you try to emulate what you like and realise that your first attempts will fall flat at the first few paces to match up to it – I learnt this very early on! I remember that I really wanted to make a game like Hocus Pocus (the 1994 DOS game developed by Moonlite Studios, published by Apogee).
I’d spent so many hours on the game and my love of Fantasy at the time really inspired me to make a platformer that was Dragon themed – I always wanted dragons to be the protagonist rather than the antagonist. I wrote a letter to Apogee studios, outlining what I wanted in my game and with sketches because I couldn’t quite imagine my little things in QBasic living up to that dream.
I still coded, however! I made a DOS application that played Happy Birthday while drawing out a present box and balloons for a friend. I always remember the look of confusion on her face as I gave her a floppy disk in a birthday card envelope!
The first games that I implemented were in Visual Basic – where the hide/show screen proved an effective way of advancing a story. One example was where you had to guide my guinea pig through a garden – either befriending or fighting random animals that would visit him. I always remember the little guestbook feature I put at the end for people who played the game (family and friends!).
So where am I now? My tastes are no more in Science Fiction rather than Fantasy (but by no means am I ruling it out) and C# is my current language of choice.
There’s also a massive change in how I’ve been learning. Tutorials are moving, rather than staying static on a printed page: there are Youtube tutorials, a plethora of assets, forums and support found in every little corner of the internet. There’s so much all at once – I have to try and pace myself so that I don’t forget everything!
However, I haven’t changed in a lot of ways. Starting small, starting humble with a lot of thirst to learn – it’s like 21 years haven’t passed at all!
How about you? I’d love to know how your programming story started!
Suzie
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Critical Lit Games 