My Industrial Design Semester Project: INK

[iambanana]

Evening y'all.

Haven't really been active on the forums lately due to what I'm about to show you.

I'm doing a masters degree in Industrial Design in Oslo. Currently on my fifth semester, entering the sixth. I've been working on a single project all semester and I thought I'd post a sneak peak here to celebrate that I'm finally fucking finished.

In short, the task was to create something for teens aged thirteen to sixteen. With a project this free I thought I'd focus on something that interests me, namely drawing. I won't go into great detail for now, if you have questions you can just post them here and I'll reply as good as I can.

For now, here's a short Youtube-friendly trailer to quickly explain what the project is all about.



Any comments, questions or other feedback is much appreciated.

Please move this if it's in the wrong section.

[Black Spot]

That looks a like a lot of fun.

[Velocity Kendall]

thats incredible!!
i sent that vid to all my art nerd mates. awesome work sir.

[Shahan]

How much will this cost?
Will it be available in USA?
When can I buy it? O_e

[Januz]

Is this actually working? Looks awesome! The rigger must have been hell to write

[Jason Manley]

Nice work. Welcome back. Thanks for posting too.

[iambanana]

You know when you see a magic trick you really like, but then you find out how it's done and it's not impressive at all any more? Well, this is going to be one of those moments.

This isn't real, unfortunately.

To get a working prototype in four months using only one person who doesn't know squat about programming would be next to impossible. Our main goal for the semester was to come up with a clear and recognizable brand aimed at teens with at least one product to show for it. A good two months were spent just doing analysis-work, brand strategy reports and coming up with the concept.
This is an example of what we call evidencing. Evidencing is to portray something in a realistic way to convince viewers that this could actually be done in real life.
The ingame footage you see is an animation done in After Effects. The rigger is also an animation. The scanner itself is a foam model that I've plastered, spray coated and attached various functional doodads to. Here's a photo of the product itself.



Nonetheless, I'm very pleased with the outcome. I think I overshot the scope of the project by wanting to create a game, and I'm glad I did in the end, although it was one hell of a semester. The response at my university has thus far been very positive, and there's going to be an exhibition in a few weeks time where I can hopefully pick up an award or two if I'm lucky.

With that said, I'll try to answer a few questions.

How much will this cost?
It's very hard to say. With some work, I could probably calculate what the material and production cost of the physical product itself would be, but counting in payrolls, transportation and all the other costs makes it impossible for me to say what the actual retail price would be. The technical components required don't even exist yet, for one. Well, they do, but they don't work well enough. Give it a few years time and maybe we'll see something usable.

Will it be available in USA?
In theory, yes, absolutely. The product was thought to be solely sold online, and available in any country.

When can I buy it?
Although this is a fake NOW, who knows if someone wants to produce it. I'm not ready to lay the project to rest just yet, and I have a few ideas up my sleeve for how I could spread the concept around to game developers.

And thank you so much for all the compliments. And thank you VK for spreading it around. It really means alot.

[Shahan]

I see, yeah I am currently taking a secondary intro to computer science course and WOW ... this stuff is really hard. And I couldn't imagine how hard this would be.
But honestly GREAT video anyway! really cool... Great idea, hope this gets made.

Also this made me go mess around in Photoshop cs5 or cs6 using Puppet Warp! which is something I think this program would use, or something like it.

PUPPET WARP DEMO , MATT KOHR

[iambanana]

So I got a nomination. Holyfuckyeah.

It's in the category form and expression. I later found out that I'd been shortlisted, which means the few works that the first jury brings back a larger jury to have a look at. So I'm pretty stoked about that. It must be said though, that nobody who's ever been on fifth semester has ever won in that category. We are after all competing with the masters and diploma students. Nonetheless, this is great news. The award ceremony is this afternoon.