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An interactive application that allows users to meet the now extinct Dodo bird. Users would be able to interact with life sized Dodo in the virtual environment, giving the illusion to them that they are seeing and interacting with a real Dodo bird.
Target Audience
18 - 25 years
Goal/Problem Statement
- What is the goal of the whole application?
- To allow users to 'meet' with the Dodo birds that are now extinct. This would enable users to get a glimpse of how this ancient bird and their habitat looked like.
- To allow users to interact with Dodo birds, see how they would react when approached by man.
- Also perhaps to make users become more aware and appreciate the current living species of birds that we have now.
- What is the application trying to solve? (problem statement)
Being the symbol of extinction, just like dinosaurs are, Dodo birds are somehow forgotten. Dinosaurs have movies made about them, toy figures made for kids to play with and adults to collect. They have numerous documentaries made about them. Ongoing research all around the world, with scientists and archaeologists wanting to find more of their fossils, but Dodo birds seem to be just gone, buried deep down within the hype of finding more about dinosaurs. Dodo birds' existence sometime ago is long neglected, it ended when people came up with the saying 'Dead as Dodo'.
People acknowledge the fact that they're extinct, but the amount of research on them is not as great as to compare with the dinosaurs. This is worrying, as they used to be part of the ecosystem, but information about them is scarce. Scientists have admitted that the way to understand ourselves and life is to study the evolution, how we and other beings have evoluted from the past, and to do this, we would have to study the extinct. I quote Alan Cooper, a zoologist at the University of Oxford,
Dodo birds deserved to be studied more, to justify their title as a figure of extinction.
This is what the application is trying to solve. The least that this application can do, which I hope it will, is to contribute to a small part in the research on Dodo birds. A virtual application that would allow people to get to know them, perhaps a little bit closer than what the documentaries and movies could provide, as users would be able to interact with them. Virtual life sized Dodo birds, responding to human's approach could leave people with all the imagination on how the birds used to live on earth.
People acknowledge the fact that they're extinct, but the amount of research on them is not as great as to compare with the dinosaurs. This is worrying, as they used to be part of the ecosystem, but information about them is scarce. Scientists have admitted that the way to understand ourselves and life is to study the evolution, how we and other beings have evoluted from the past, and to do this, we would have to study the extinct. I quote Alan Cooper, a zoologist at the University of Oxford,
"Island taxa such as the dodo and solitaire often represent extreme examples of evolution—and if we want to examine how we, or the life around us, evolved then such animals are very educational. By examining island birds we can investigate how evolution works—because extreme examples are often the best views of how something works."
Dodo birds deserved to be studied more, to justify their title as a figure of extinction.
This is what the application is trying to solve. The least that this application can do, which I hope it will, is to contribute to a small part in the research on Dodo birds. A virtual application that would allow people to get to know them, perhaps a little bit closer than what the documentaries and movies could provide, as users would be able to interact with them. Virtual life sized Dodo birds, responding to human's approach could leave people with all the imagination on how the birds used to live on earth.
3. What is the advantage of VR that can be exploited to enhance project?
This interactive application would allow users to see their form, the environment they had as habitat, their simple behaviours (their movements, how they react when approached by humans during their time, how they eat, etc). It is obviously impossible to happen in the real world because they're no longer around. The possibilities to interact with an extinct animal could now be offered with virtual reality applications. This application intends to give the original experience in a VR application that is designed based on the studies of the Dodo bird and it's habitat.
4. Is this project new or has it been created before? If yes, why are you doing it again?
Documentaries, movies and TV series that feature Dodo birds in some parts of them have been made, but then again, they're all non-interactive. Aside from documentaries, the appearances of the Bird in movies (Alice in Wonderland, for example) and TV series (Primeval) are only brief, and the stories do not really revolve around them.
Applications that have similar kinds of interactions with current living animals have been made (see Sniff and Kinectimals), but there are yet to be any records of a virtual application that allows users to interact with extinct animals. So, no, there are no projects with this concept that have been created and that is all the more reason why I'm doing it.
Objectives
- to allow users to see and meet the bird which is now history
- to enable users to interact with the bird
- to make the users feel some kind of relationship with the bird
- to subtly instill some kind of awareness in humans, perhaps to be more responsible in treating the current endangered animals species
Benchmarks
Character
Interaction
Character
Environment
*note: I got the idea to create this application after seeing Sniff, the video was posted on the FCM's Aesthetic Media blog.
Level Description
While feeding, users would see the way the Bird eat. Not much different from any other birds, though, but then again, this is an extinct bird that we're talking about. The application does not really have a start and ending, the bird will be programmed to randomly walks away and comes back at random times, or when users isn't doing anything to interact with the bird.
- Description of application.
A user walks to the screen, which is already showing a rainforest environment, which is the habitat of the Dodo bird. In about a few seconds after the user stands there in front of the screen, a Dodo bird would walk slowly into the scene. The bird would stop at a certain distance from the user, sensing the user's presence there.
The user would then try to get nearer to the bird. The bird would be hesitant at first, when user tries to approach it. This is where the movements of the user will determine the bird's response. If the user moves slowly, then the bird would be more likely to remain calm and let the user comes closer to it. Just like pigeons, as this article has stated, Dodo birds would let humans come near to them, if approached with the right way. If user moves too aggressively to go towards it, the bird will move away from user.
The user would then try to get nearer to the bird. The bird would be hesitant at first, when user tries to approach it. This is where the movements of the user will determine the bird's response. If the user moves slowly, then the bird would be more likely to remain calm and let the user comes closer to it. Just like pigeons, as this article has stated, Dodo birds would let humans come near to them, if approached with the right way. If user moves too aggressively to go towards it, the bird will move away from user.
Assuming that this application actually allows user to treat the Dodo bird as a pet, user would be able to feed the bird with berries from the berry bush inside the virtual world. This secondary interaction, will let users see how Dodo birds really were flightless birds. In the attempt to 'play' with the bird, users could raise the berry as high as they could, and in response to this, the bird will flap their wings and jump, in order to get the berry from the user's hand.
2. How will users interact with the application
User's movements will be detected by an IR camera, and therefore the animals' reactions towards users would be based on the proximity/collision between the user's virtual character and the animals/objects in the virtual environment.
Interaction description
- users will be able to 'touch' the bird
- users will be able to make the bird follow them
- users will be able to feed the bird (with berries from the bushes)
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