Interactive Comic Strips

Webcomics are a staple of game culture, combining humor and an often encyclopedic knowledge of the medium to make us laugh at the (sometimes inordinate) influence games have on our lives. Ozge Samanci, a Ph.D. student in digital media at Georgia Tech is making the relationship between games and comics even more intimate. He's making them interactive.

Working with assistant professor Alexandra Mazalek, who has a film background, and Yanfeng Chen, a master's student in human-computer interaction, Samanci has built a system that uses cameras to capture a user's gestures. These gestures are then translated to a avatar on a large screen. Depending on the user's gestures, the avatar triggers different conditions, which drive the comic down a narrative path. The result is a printout of your interaction as a traditional comic strip.

Samanci's first interactive comic drew on the most basic bit of human slapstick, the courtship of sperm and egg. "I wanted to do something absurd and funny and shocking," Samanci told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "Also something that's a playful challenge. You don't often have the chance to be inside the female reproductive system."

In the comic, the user plays the part of an egg, who must choose a sperm. By waving one's hand over a swimming sperm, the user can view a snapshot of how the product of that union would develop. One possibility, for example, is that the zygote might become a scientist working in a digital lab on interactive comics! (It's good to see that Samanci's work preserves the game comic's penchant for self referential humor.) A demo video of the work is available at Samanci's site.

Scott Snibbe is another artist working on comics that accept user input. Snibbe recently had an installation up at the Berkeley Art Museum called "Falling Girl." As a girl falls from a skyscraper in dreamy slow motion, she witnesses and responds to the events that play out in the windows she passes, which are rendered in silhouette. By the time she reaches the ground, the girl is an old woman, completely transformed by the fall. Visitors, caught on cameras in the museum, may see themselves appear in the skyscraper's windows, reacting with varying levels of engagement or indifference to the female form drifting past.

Maybe someday in the not too distant future, interactive comics will come to the web, and we'll be able to share and influence the lives of Tycho and Gabe. Then again, we already know what their lives are like. We live them every day.

[via AJC.com]