I’ve had to rethink my idea a bit, since the immersive and interactive portion required people to go to places and be together with other people. I could still do an immersive experience, but have it be something that’s activated by something else that’s social distancing approved, like vehicles driving by or maybe some thing(s) on my house could be activated by the few people who come to my doorstep (pretty much just the mail carrier these days).
I might also be able to make a fun, uplifting, or educational interactive thing at a business. A lot of local businesses are teaming up with local artists to create gift sets and such (like a gift card and painting bundle). Grocery stores are still open, and Schnuck’s in Urbana, for example, has a tube-like entrance to the store. Maybe I could get approval to do something there. While it’s not exactly a (smaller) local business, it’s an idea.
I’d really like to work on something interactive, while utilizing the new addition to the project parameters. Live streaming a show might be difficult depending on what I do. I’ve been testing out streaming with OBS and Twitch, although I need to do some field tests with a live audience, as well as look into integrating multiple streams.
The other day I participated in a collaborative live stream, and it was pretty awesome. I used an audio reactive program to display the visuals, and I pulled the audio from a live stream that a friend was doing. He then took my live stream and streamed it through his channel (so showing my visuals with his audio). While the program I used was already written, I could replace the program window with a coding window. I’m not sure if there’s a more effective way to do this, but it does give way to live collaborative works.
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I’ve also thought about creating a program that only allows one user to be on at a time. I know this has been done before a bit, but instead of keeping track of how long the single user has been online, my program would obscure or black out the page if there is more than one person on it. This would be an online version of our real-world social distancing. Maybe the information on the page could be related to COVID-19 or maybe it’s even my personal website, but only one person can view it at a time, otherwise it’s all “infected”. Perhaps this will be a personal project rather than my BFA project.