Progressive Keystrokes

Today I tried finishing up the map by adding geometry and rescaling some of the height levels. While I didn't get to finishing all of it I'm very close. While readjusting some of the levels I decided to work out the UI a little more. 

I had a few idea's in my head mainly a 3D mouse kind of like an Omni tool that one would find in the ME Universe. But after spit-balling a little bit I came to the conclusion that having a mouse interface like that would be rather counter intuitive and would just net me extra work. As such the mouse & keyboard combination was scrapped and I settled on a menu & keyboard. 

Having a holographic keyboard that will be typed on presents a few problems. The actor needs a reference of where in the air to type and in post production you need solid tracker points. With that in mind I came up with a small wire rig and 4 bright reflective beads. The idea is that 2 wires suspend 2 beads each with every bead representing a corner of the keyboard. The wires will be suspended outside of the shot and the wires themselves will be easy to clean out later. This will give both the actor and the tracker the same solid reference and should hopefully make for a good set of shots.

I'm aware that typing in the air is an issue so I'll have to make sure that the person who will be doing so will at least roughly adhere to the qwerty layout when typing. The reason I want to get that down as solid as possible is because I want the keystrokes to light up. It would essentially be visual instead of force feedback that you'd get with normal keystrokes. This brings forth something else as well though, it means that I'd have to create a keyboard that adheres to the qwerty layout and have each key work and function accordingly and independently. To do that I made a full keyboard with each key labeled and marked with their proper function.

As you can see in the image above each key is color labeled according to it's group and named after the specific function. Having the script and footage at hand it'll merely be a matter of syncing up the keystrokes to the actors performance.

The keyboard itself is a depth map as well and will work in a similar fashion as the map is set up as well. Which means all the visible lines will generate and displace a set of particles. I realize that it looks rather bland at this point without any characters on the keys. Reason being that I'm still debating if characters would make it too chaotic with the particle grid. That will simply just be something for tomorrow when I give make a test animation.

The menu/monitor I have in mind isn't going to be overly complex and should become rather straight forward as well. I'm planning on keeping it very minimalistic and efficient with it's purpose in shorts scenario in mind. The actual design is still up in the air at this point but we'll fix that tomorrow.