This project has come a long way from where it started, considering our initial idea was to create some sort of interactive advertising material for the showcase. The transition to a party visualiser has made this project very enjoyable to work on as we have had complete creative freedom with it and where to take it. That was something that we were a little apprehensive about as we were told in the first few weeks that if we were going to do anything around the showcase we had to use the showcase branding which was very limiting. Using the showcase as a starting point however, gave us a good starting point and ultimately did inform the final outcome and there is nothing stopping us from putting it in the pre-awards setting that we were looking at earlier in the semester but we have noticed that it actually interacts better with music which is why we have leaned towards the party scene rather than general events. This also helped shape our tone and how to present it as focusing it towards the NZ house party scene, allowed us to make it quite comical when it came to the icons and the stories behind them.

During the building of the web app, I realised that a lot of the work had shifted from the visualisation of the audio and more towards the models, which I felt was a less essential part considering we were looking at mapping the space through the audio and the population but less about the individuals. Part of this though I realised was due to me already having prototyped the audio input and visualisation earlier in the semester and so the models were something new and I had to work around how to make them work. Looking back on the completed products though, it was definitely worth putting in all that effort in to the models though as having different stories and characters, not only does it make the whole application more intriguing, but it also does help to map the space more as the particular characters contribute to the overall vibe of the space. And having tested it in actual party environments, people really enjoy the little characteristics that we have given to the models (probably because they can relate to them or they know someone who can).

The biggest issue I have faced with the making of this project is unfortunately one of the core elements of it, the library P5.js. I used P5 for all of the visuals and the audio input as it was the easiest way to incorporate audio and being essentially Processing, it could definitely do the visuals. However, an issue I have come across is that it really is designed to be used in quite a light way and not to manipulate the positioning of multiple complex 3D models. We tested it in ideal use case scenarios and it performed fine but as soon as we started to push it it started to throw some serious errors. After some searching why it was doing this though I came across multiple people saying that the library isn't always kept up to date with the current version of every browser and so there is a chance that sometimes it can mess up especially with high traffic. And considering the way we managed to break it was by opening a bunch of tabs with it and then closing them all quickly, that's pretty high traffic. The way to get around this and make it 100% reliable would be to take it off the web and just make it an actual app. We never intended it to be an app though, as we wanted it to be as accessible as possible to anyone and web is the easiest way to do that, and by having it on the web, when it messes up you can simply reload the page and it will be up and running again.

Future Directions

Something that we talked about earlier in the semester was having the ability to set up "rooms" and then you could access those rooms with their codes, so that different parties could have their own visuals. Currently it is all one visualisation of any inputs that are connected, so you could have multiple parties showing it and it would be taking audio input from all of them and displaying it. So having the ability to keep them localised to particular events, means that you could do what we initially intended which is check the visualiser before you leave for the party. But also I feel having a "global" visualisation is a cool aspect as you could contribute from anywhere in the world to "one big party". Multiple rooms would also allow us to expand it to cater for various events and not just a house party as we could tailor the models and the type of visuals to suit the event.

We have also talked about how cool it would be to have at a music festival to visualise the amount of people there. As people always have their phones out at festivals, you may as well use that to your advantage and you could integrate into the festival's app or something so that people could input and see themselves on the big screen at each stage and for people not at the festival they could see how many people are at the various stages and what the mood is. At this stage it is still very much focused on optimising the experience for web and getting audio input but if it was linked to the audio input of the performance then every single person could play a part in the visuals, giving the festival experience a much more interactive aspect.