Concept & Prototyping
4th semester at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication
The first visualisation I made for the project as I was still approaching the Augmented Reality angle. I tried to imagine a desktop PC with AR streaming capabilities, where the table would house the computer and act as a spatial environment for volumetric workflows.
My penultimate semester at Ravensbourne, London centred around the topic 'Concept & prototyping', so naturally I did a lot of sketching, ideation, restarting and mock-ups. My main topic was based on the emerging technology Augmented Reality, and how to bring it into the mainstream market. I realised through research that there were other more pressing matters to take care of before AR devices could succeed; Head-Mounted Displays (HMD's) are simply too awkward and bulky at the moment, so we have to make them smaller. How? I got around to the solution that if Moore's Law can't make it possible to render realistic 3D graphics locally in the HMD, maybe we can render the content elsewhere. I'm not referring to a cabled experience, like what is being done with some devices - I mean cloud rendering and processing.
5G data is coming soon and I think it may serve as a solution to bringing new technologies up to speed by providing low-latency gigabit connections. So I changed my project angle towards a 5G focus, trying to convey the potential of this technology through various means.
Below are my various results:
Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to develop an ending or a soundtrack for this narrative, so it will have to serve as a prototype instead of a finished project.
Upon finishing my unfinished 3D narrative I decided I had to test other angles for my project, so I developed a more business-minded motion graphic video to illustrate the differences between generations of mobile data, leading up to the immense boost coming with 5G.
Again, this project was not finished, seeing as my tutor did not like the approach, critiquing it for being 'too dull' in a way.
Panicking due to my time constraint and with two unfinished projects in the pipeline, I restarted once more to develop a third concept. This was more of an experimental thing which I didn't really know where I was going with. It is practically a simulation of 3D phones imploding when I enable collisions in Cinema 4D. The larger narrative idea of this was to superimpose the phones on a blueprint texture to try to plan a next-gen phone that could carry the amount of performance required by the increasingly demanding consumer base, using more internet based services every day (I even see people watching downloaded Netflix shows on the London tube now). The phones ended up looking sub-par in my very slow renders, so I decided to keep on developing prototypes and stitch all my work together to at least showcase that I did not waste any time not trying to make something representative of professional quality.
As my presentation deadline grew ever closer, I decided to combine all my work into a continuous video showcasing different angles of tackling a concept development task for 5G as a solution to getting Augmented Reality to work, and I actually ended up getting very positive feedback as a result of this decision. The project had become so fragmented, but I managed to connect the individual parts and create some sort of structure through this final montage video, where I added in an autonomous car industry graphic developed in Adobe Illustrator:
The project turned out to work fairly well, especially coupled with myself as a narrator, talking about the content as it played. The presentation was further helped by my personal approach to the otherwise stale PowerPoint show we all know so well. Being a Moving Image student I developed my own personal template to presentations, using mainly animated content on all slides, limiting the amount of text and bullet points that the audience needs to keep up with. Instead I show my media content developed specifically for the presentation, allowing the audience a visual input to accompany all the ramblings coming out of my mouth. I have personally often caught myself zoning out during text-based presentations, just reading the bullet points and forgetting about the speaker, so at least for my case I find that this animated approach works quite well.
I would use montages of relevant content or small sequences developed exclusively for the purpose of a single slide, delivering clear and concise information to strengthen what I am saying.
Examples for this project are:
My animated storyboard and flow-chart acted as a transition from Concept to Prototyping, as I switched from talking ideas to actually showing my practical output.
To show my tutor that I followed the process that he had established and kept telling me that I was forgetting about, I developed this word association first on paper, then adapted it to a playful animation which ran on my final slide as I received feedback.
So that is basically 'it' for this project.
As a bonus, I created a few extra materials; some which went to my postgraduate blog, some went to my written research proposal accompanying the presentation, and some files went entirely unused.
As explained briefly above, I developed this experimental flowchart hoping to illustrate the differences between autonomous car manufacturers in a fragmented market, versus one where they use a connected, open-sourced system, aided by 5G connectivity to allow cars to communicate Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V). It is purely speculative, not grounded in research.
A flow-chart attempting to lay out my dissertation project and the various tools I would need to create parts of the project, all coming together in the end
An early mindmap for the various stages I would have to go through during the project cycle
Proposed schedule for my final dissertation project
The preview render that I showed to my tutor before finishing the polished video shown above
Presenting: A stupidly large amount of cameras utilised for the filming of my various camera angles deployed for an engaging 3D film. Yes, I spent my entire Spring break developing that part of the project...
I felt sort of silly making this animation, but integrity is important to me and as such I needed an animated sequence to deliver my punchline!
Behind-the-scenes for my 3D narrative
If you made it this far down the page, I thank you for your time and attention.
Any constructive (or destructive) feedback would be heavily appreciated!
