IDAT 204 - Concept Ideas

After deciding on a general idea of the Org-ant for our project, yesterday Sara and I got together to try to get some more detailed ideas of what our project aimed to do.  We knew that we wanted to design a product that would show a group of ants working as an organism rather than just a single creature.  In researching this concept I found a number of examples that have previously been made relating to this concept of a virtual ant farm.  Two examples are listed below:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-9913568-1.html

http://www.geocities.com/chamonate/hormigas/antfarm/ (zip file needs to be downloaded)

I was not surprised at this result as the ant concept is used a lot in computing, such as in Langton's ant.  This therefore meant we needed to find a way of producing an ant farm that would be individual and have more depth than those previously designed. After researching into ants Sara found the video below:

This gave us an idea as we could use the product to cross over the lives of human and ants, therefore creating an ant-human interactive environment that had not been looked at before.  This meant we could encorporate elements of human lives into an ant built environment such as an ant farm.  The following was a page of ideas we drew up yesterday including GUI design and functionality:

(to see a larger version click on the image)

From these designs we decided on a few key points that we wanted to encorporate. The main elements that we have currently settled on are listed below:

• Underground ant environment
• Interactive element - placement of walls: this will prevent the ants from using a tunnel and so they will have to build/change to a different tunnel.  This is key to demonstrating the intelligent behaviour required as part of this project
• Interactive element - Placement of a microphone(image) into the environment: This will cause one of the ants to interact back to the user with an item of speech, demonstrating commuication.  This is an interesting element as the interactivity then works both ways
• Interactive element - food:  Placement of food such as an apple into the area will attract ants and the food will then be eaten, unblocking the path and demonstrating the need for food that all organisms share
• Interactive element - Placement of money: Money is very important to human society so money objects will be included and will cause the ants to swarm towards it.
• 3D objects in a 2D/1D environment -  the interactive elements will look 3D to make it seem like elements from reality are being placed into the virtual ant farm environment
• The ants will either be 1D dots or simplistic 2D elements that detract away from the specific imagery of ants, allowing the human-ant connection to be more easily recognised

 

These elements we hope to be able to encorporate into the final product.  We now need to refine our designs and settle on a final proposal, after which we will start building the product.