Production Design

Now that lots of elements are coming together I have moved on to production design. Given this is an immersive experience there is another story that is being told to lead participants (or my heroes) to start the experience. The space needs to feel lived in by a professor. I am trying to meet the participants where they are and this happens to be at a University festival where they happen to stumble upon a room where something is amiss. Secrets are revealed and the portal opens to MAIA.

Elements worked on these last few weeks:

• Develop a new story for the space and design elements for use in the space (Professor Dupin I presume!?), fabrication next. This is the final layout for the space I am using, but not completely a representation of the space.

  

  
  

• Continued to improve the timing of the experience code. its all about the timing to make it feel as natural as possible. First I am testing on a nVidia Jetson Nano with 4GB graphics processor that should be sufficient for MAIA given the small model sizes I am using. Otherwise I did aquire a 5070 Ti but Apple decided to not allow Cuda to work with Apple Silicon so back to the drawing board.

  

• Gathered materials from my supporting partner Flower Power, the oldest Apothecary in New York City. I went up to their Piermont location to find props to incorporate into the experience. The owner, Lata, was extremely generous, and I collected lots of great artifacts. The adventure continues after the MAIA Experience this summer in the Lower East Side.

  
  

  

  
  

• finished a rough cut of the movie that will play during the experience using Generative AI tool for visuals (Midjourney, Reve, and Kling AI) and integrated them together with Adobe After Effects.

  
  

  
  

• Scouting the location for the experience. Construction is nearly complete on a one way mirror room pair.