Organum Interactive Game sponsored by F. Warren Hellman

Talk to My Voicebox

Organum, initially conceived as a movie, is becoming interactive thanks to support from the F.Warren Hellman Family Fund. The interaction allows three or more players to control the movements of an on-screen organ. The organs are on a quest which can only be solved through collaboration. A working group of graduate and undergraduate students, together with Greg Niemeyer and Chris Chafe, are currently working on prototyping the Organum game on PD and Unreal Tournament at the Berkeley Institute of Design (BID), located in UC Berkeley's Hearst Mining Building.

On May 14, 2004, the BID held an open house for the general public. For the first time, collaborators of the Organum Game presented the phase I stage of the project and invited the public to play the game. The simple video game explores the relationship between sound and animation. The video game requires teamwork and different voice inputs of three players. Players soon discover that they control the motion in each axis (x, y, and z) of the three-dimensional screen by projecting different vocal pitches into individiual microphones. Together, the players represent a single sphere which must hit flashing spherical targets. Once players hit a target, another target appears. After players successfully hit a few targets, a three-dimensional image of a seal and the amount of time taken to finish the game appears on the screen.

The picture on the left shows an example of how the Organum Game in the phase I stage appears on the screen. Three players control the movement of the large gray sphere near the top of the screen. The two small and static yellow spheres represent targets that the three players completed. On the bottom right hand corner of the image, a large yellow sphere flashes. Players are trying to hit the large yellow sphere with the large gray sphere in order to finish the game. Click here to see more photos of the event.