About Marioneta
Marioneta is an installation for the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh which uses the Microsoft Kinect v2 to allow guests to embody a collection of antique puppets in a virtual environment. The focus is on creating an experience wherein elements in the world react to the users’ actions through these puppets.
Why antique puppets?
Puppet models in the experience are based on a collection of puppets donated to the museum by Margo Lovelace. The original puppets are carefully exhibited in a large display case on the wall in the museum. Many of the puppets in the museum’s collection are antiques, fragile or valuable and not suited to hands-on play by the museum’s young visitors. Marioneta uses technology to make museum puppets available for imaginative and interesting play.
What is the experience like?
The experience is composed of auto-rotating seasonal stages and season-related interactive objects that have visual and audial feedback. Users can throw a pumpkin in the fall, pick up an ice ball in winter, play with cowbells in spring, and break a lantern filled with fireflies in summer.
Who worked on this project?
A team of students worked on this project including:
Christina Tarn as Producer
Maria A Montenegro as Tech/Programming Lead
Emily Chang as Programmer
Alex Moser as 3D Artist/Techinical Artist
Hyunghwan Byun as Experience Designer
I decided to look more into Hyunghwan Byun because I aspire to become a UX designer. It would be helpful for me to learn more about his work and his design process.
Link to project website:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/marioneta/index.html
About Hyunghwan Byun
Hyunghwan is an Experience Designer who wants to be a connecting point between technologies and human. He wants to design human-centered and amazing experience. He studied Materials Science and Engineering during undergraduate program before coming Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. His experience covers various fields including Game Design, Sound Design, Film and Physical Computing.
Hyunghwan’s Experience:
Interaction Designer, Seerflix Inc. | 2015 – 2016
Experience design, rapid prototyping, UI design, qualitative user research, concepting, design system development, for Web-based interactive 3D authoring application
UX Designer, Adobe | Sep 2016 – Present
Experience design, rapid prototyping, qualitative user research for AI and machine learning features as part of the Photoshop team
Hyunghwan Byun’s Work
Marioneta
Here, he explains the design goals as well user journey maps, prototyping selection design, coming up with user personas, and gesture prototyping and more.
https://byun.design/marioneta
DESIGN GOALS
- Updating an old installation in the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh
- Give a chance for kids to become a puppet in an intuitive and simple way. We’ll know our success if the kids enjoy our experience without confusion.
- Give a safe playground for playing without fear of right or wrong to kids. We’ll know our success if the kids move their bodies freely without hesitation.
- Avoid using text on the screen. If it needs, we’re going to use large, short words or voice. We’ll know our success if the kids understand how to play with the environment.
Toy Train’s Adventure VR Prototype
This particular work interested me because I am interested in game design and VR.
https://byun.design/toy-trains-adventure-vr
ABOUT
This prototype is a 2-week long one-man project running on the Google Cardboard VR platform. The objective is moving rabbits around a map to a safe area to avoid the lion’s threat. The player helps moving rabbits by keeping the train’s route safe.
GAME OBJECTIVE
- In the given time, move rabbits as many you can to a safe area
- The train can move only one rabbit at a time
- A player should avoid the lion’s collision on the train
- A player can destroy the lion’s threat by placing the mushroom bomb
GAME DESIGN
Rabbit spawner
Rabbits are spawned at one of the spawning positions randomly.
The spawning cycle is determined by the remaining time to create gradually increasing difficulty.
Lion spawner
Lions are spawned at one of the spawning positions randomly.
The spawning cycle is determined by the remaining time to create gradually increasing difficulty.
Lions are set to Navmesh agent and avoid props on routes automatically.
Mushroom spawner
The mushroom bomb is spawned at the position the player gazes at.
The mushroom bomb is spawned with a particle system and it destroys colliding lions.
I really enjoy how he breaks down the individual parts in the game design. He also talks about Future Improvements that he would make to improve the game.
Object Selection Tool | Photoshop
This is his process of how he created a tool for photoshop.
You can find more information on his process by visiting his website:
https://byun.design/objectselectiontool
A Selection Tool with Intelligence
The Object Selection tool is a Photoshop tool that automatically creates a selection around the borders of the object users highlight. The tool simplifies the process of selecting an object in an image with the help of a semantic understanding of the image.
Select an Object EffortlesslyCreate a rectangular selection around the object. The tool automatically snaps the selection to object remove over-selected area or include less-selected area
HOW IT WORKS
Create a rectangular selection around the object.
The tool automatically snaps the selection to object.
Remove over-selected area or include less-selected area
Curvation Pen Tool | Photoshop
This is another tool that he created for Photoshop. It is neat to see someone’s work with Adobe and how huge of an impact they can make.
https://byun.design/curvaturepentool
DRAW PATHS NATURAL
Curvature Pen tool in Photoshop is designed for users to create precise paths without dealing with confusing Bezier handles that we see from the traditional Pen tool. Path drawing is as simple as just placing points on the canvas.
Overview & My Thoughts
Overall, I really enjoyed looking into this Marioneta Project, understanding the process and the goals behind the project. Since I was able to experience this piece in the Children’s Museum I was really able to see the curiosity and care-free nature that it brought out of people including myself.
Throughout this research assignment, I didn’t realize that I would find another designer that I admire. Hyunghwan Byun has become a designer I look up to. Not only does he break down the process behind what he does, but he also pays close attention to detail along the way. I believe this is what makes him so successful and also land a job at Adobe. The impact that he is making with interactivity and UX Design is the same impact that I strive to make in the corporate field.