Tiny Dancer AR Project

The objective of this project was to provide a joyful experience that you could feel truly a part of both physically and virtually. The motivation behind this project was the talent show dance scene in the cult classic movie Napoleon Dynamite. When posed with the assignment, the first thing I thought to do was create a dance floor and animate a little person to dance their virtual heart out. The feeling of holding someone, even a mini virtual someone who looks to be experiencing joy to a lively song naturally spreads that same joy to the viewer. When making this I spent so long just watching them dance and being happy at the creation in itself. The target users for this experience are definitely lovers of dance, music, odd movies of the early 2000s, and people who enjoy a good show! This experience has given joy and fond memories of floppy disks and educated the youth about what floppy disks are. This was all done by reintroducing the floppy disk as an image target for virtual reality, painted as a checkered dance floor.

I spent a lot of time learning how to get the animation for each dancer's choreography just right. In order to enhance the experience, I added a disco ball that also rotates with each character. In addition to the disco ball, I added a dance button that allows the dancers to dance in near-perfect sync! Watching them dance in sync changes the feeling to me because it goes from watching one dancer to the next, to watching them both and feeling a similar feeling to that of a flash dance mob of the 2010s.

My implementation issues were definitely with the disco ball. I was unsure how to create it until I was reminded by a fellow classmate to see if Unity had any free assets. I saw a sci-fi "rolling ball" and thought, close enough! I struggled with its animation as well but then I remembered the recorded animation tactics we used in class to make the drones fly around. So I implemented the same, and it worked out perfectly.