#onecircle

Here’s a redraw of a scene from the episode yesterday

When we tested out our initial motion tracking sketch, we found it interesting to play with the behaviour of the marking circles: How well the circles follow movement, and the way circles merge, when to persons get close to each other. But because all persons being tracked have their own circles, the invitation for engaging socially is very limited. We needed to insert more interesting relations between people being tracked.

The user needed a goal to pursue, and the goal could be provided by the system. We decided to explore, what would happen if we only showed one circle at time. We modified our sketch to have one marking circle, that follows one moving person at a time. If another person comes near the circle changes target and follows the new person.

We needed the circle to change target fluently instead of stepwise (Lenz et al., 2003). This was done by implementing physics of velocity and acceleration into the circle object and an algorithm to steer the transition.

This turned out to offer an abstract but clear goal for the user: To either have the circle or avoid it. This way the circle became a spotlight connoting the system's focus. The concept was similar to the classic children's game "tag".

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