This past Tuesday Dr. Jason Camelot, Michael Fortin, and Stephanie Bouchard playtested the Victorianator in semi-public fashion for the first time. The game is still in pre-alpha, but the team decided to open up testing to gain information on the programmed gestures, their usability, and to see how closely people could match Jason’s pre-recorded gestures.
Dr. Camelot explained the game as “an iPhone game that uses gestures to trigger synthetic effects on vocal recordings.” Users record themselves reciting a Victorian era poem in monotone, then use gestures to influence the inflection and sound of the recording to match a Victorian poet’s style. The current gestures are “pitch rise, prolongation, vibrato, pitch fall, and falsetto:
Michael Fortin explains how the system measures movement using the iPhone/iPod Touch’s accelerometers:
Jason demonstrated some of the gestures before the playtest was kick-started:
Thanks to all who showed up and helped the team with valuable feedback! Future videos will have better sound/stability too.