Other than the fact that I’m facing crippling mental issues, I can’t find a way to make my midterm concept adequately translate into a final piece. It’s impossible to make even a preliminary prototype, and, it’s already week 12, meaning it’s far too late to start from scratch.

In other words, I have nothing of substance.

I’ll just spend my remaining time looking at something which I thought of, after hearing Bryan and Merlin’s comments in week 11. The gist of what they said was that whatever I previously had wasn’t interactive and thus wasn’t particularly interesting, and that it was too convoluted to be viable even as a proto-proto-prototype, but the idea of an overlay on reality is interesting, especially if there’s a distinction between real-life graphics and not. (similar to what Prof. Elke showed previously)

Don’t ask me how I came to this conclusion, but yeah, my conclusion was to try out chat integration into live streaming.

My midterm concept was about entering another person’s perspective, where you get to view the combination of their inner and outer world, i.e. their thoughts and what they’re perceiving. So, this is like a really weird offshoot which may or may not be related, since you can type out what you’re thinking. Where those words get applied to the live stream, it’s like seeing your inner thoughts overlaid onto the perceived world.

Seems like it would work pretty well with all of us being stuck at home, anyway.

I’m aware that what you type doesn’t necessarily correspond to what you actually think, and I’m also aware that I will never be able to reach a particularly high level of ability to conjure items. I’m also aware that I don’t know enough about Python, the relevant programming language which works for this stuff, to do much.

Basically, I’m going in blind, and just taking this time to learn something interesting, because I know I can’t come up with anything substantial for the final assignment. For convenience’s sake I’ll start from Twitch, which already has a strong support for this kind of thing. I’ll shift to Youtube for the sake of accessibility, if and only if it turns out that Youtube does have that same level of support. Here’s what I’ll have to do:

1. Make a list of at least 5 keywords (and synonyms/related words),
2. Get some images related to those words,
3. Learn how to use the relevant softwares, to
   1. Tie it into a stream,
   2. Create image overlays onto a live stream,
   3. Make them activate when certain chat commands are given
4. Work with any possible bugs, like spam and/or multiple simultaneous commands
5. That’s about it, really? The final presentation will just be something like everyone tuning in to the same live stream, and typing in chat, probably.

An example of me learning how to do this with StreamLabs OBS (thanks, tutorial).

An example of me learning how to do this solely in chat with chatbots (thanks, Fossabot):

other relevant things

A potential list of keywords:

1. [Keyword]: [related terms which will cause the same effect]
2. Food: hungry, hunger, lunch, dinner, breakfast, eaten, eat, ate, snack, rice, chicken, tidbit, tidbits, etc.
3. Sleep: sleepy, sleeping, bed, tired, exhausted, insomnia, nap, pillow, blanket, sofa, couch, night, moon, stars, dark
4. Covid19: covid, coronavirus, pandemic, lockdown, stay at home, inside, home, school, online, blackboard, oss, microsoft teams

A potential list of relevant softwares:

• StreamLabs Emote Wall
• Custom Commands
• Store Redemption
• Chatbot (legacy and too advanced for me, so maybe an open-source bot)
• In=built keyword finding doesn’t exist but some suggestions exist

other not-so-relevant things

(Images of the things I previously did, of which I will probably no longer be using. So long, and thanks for all the fish.)