IDAT 204 - The Proposal

Org-ant

Org-ant is a digital organism project that focuses on the relationship between humans and ants, and also highlights the existence of social organisms over that of physical organisms. The term organism is often considered as refering to physical beings, such as germs and animals, where a living system made out of cells works as an independant being.  However organisms can also be viewed in a social sense, such as that of the government, in which a group take on individual roles whilst working together, alike to cells, to keep an organisation running.  Ants alike to humans work as a team to reach particular goals, and so in doing so, act much like a social organism, whilst being organisms themselves.  Ants are therefore a good design on which to base a digital social organism.

The design of the Org-ant project environment will be influenced both by the habitat of ants and the habitat of humans.  Ant farms demonstrate the tunnelling system used by ants, as shown above.  These are an ants travel routes, alike to that of our roads, and so the design of the project will be a cross between and ant farm, and a road system. This is demonstrated on the left.  The background colour is blue, as an influence from the ant farms, and because this will be a functional colour in terms of multi-platform use such as mobiles.

In terms of the ants themselves, in order to keep the ant-human relationship strong, the ants will be drawn in 1D as dots.  This allows the user to have their own interpretation of the species of the Org-ant, rather than a pre-designed image. To give an impression of what this will be like below is a prototype animation:

In terms of interactivity there are four concepts that we intend to encorporate. These are listed below:

1. Food - The user will be able to put an apple within the highways, which the ants will eat their way through when they come across it.  This resembles the need for food that all organisms share including humans and ants.
2. Money - In order to reinforce the human-ant relationship the user will be able to place money onto the highways which will cause the ants to swarm towards it.  This is because human society relies on money and stores it, in the same way ants store the food they find.
3. Walls - The user will be able to place walls onto the highways to re-direct the ants.  This will demonstrate the intelligent behaviour of the ants and ant activity.
4. Microphone - The user will be able to place an image of a microphone into the environment which, when in contact with the microphone, will cause the ant to say something to the user.  This will heighten interactivity as the program will be interacting with the user, as well as the user interacting with the program.  This demonstrates the need for communication in human society, and the two way interaction emphasises the link between humans and ants.

The interface for this organism will be the main screen area as shown above plus a bar at the bottom of the program which contains the four elements listed.  The user will be able to click and drag each item from the bar to the highways, enabling them to place the objects anywhere within the highways.  The user will only be able to put one of each item into the environment at one time to ensure good functionality.  Once any of the items has been used it will disappear and the user can put another of that item into the environment. This is demonstrated in the video below:



The images used for the interactive elements of the interface are going to be 3D.  This is so that there is a feeling of putting something real into something digital, almost as if it is being passed through the screen into the environment.
The product itself will be programmed in Flash using Actionscript 3 and the images will be created using 3D Studio Max for the 3D images and Illustrator for the 2D images.
This concludes the Org-ant Proposal.  The next stage is to begin production of the digital organism for presentation on the 3rd Nov.