We wanted a person to be able to fly like a bird when they assumed the character of Crow. We were aware of experiments by Mark Bolas at NASA Ames in the late 80's with alternative interfaces for flying, including flapping, gliding, and following a virtual paper airplane, but none of these techniques had supplanted "finger-flying" as the convention for movement. We resolved to let Crow fly by flapping his wings.
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Designing crow flight was a wonderfully interesting problem. At first, we asked everyone we could find to tell us how they fly in their dreams. We were discouraged because so many different methods were reported. But in early tests with the system, we observed that whenever someone became embodied as Crow, they inevitably flapped their arms. Voila! It remained for Rob Tow and Graham Lindgren to figure out what constituted a "flap." Rob designed the strategy for returning the flyer to the position corresponding to the curret location of her body - an elegant landing that made every Crow feel like an expert flyer - and Graham produced a superb implementation of flight.
We tried to identify characteristics of perception and locomotion for the Critters that were consistent with the narrative motifs. Crow, for instance, has a reputation for admiring and acquiring shiny things; we thought Crow's vision might boost specular reflections in the environment. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to implement special image processing to change the participants vision when they embodied as Crow.
As with the other Critters, we used the same voice filter on both the pre-recorded dialogue recorded by the Precipice Theatre Company members and in real-time on the voice of a participant embodied as Crow - so Crow always sounded like Crow, whether speaking pre-recorded stored dialogue or with the live voice of a participant, including participants' speech recorded in Voiceholders
Follow the links below to find more about Crow:
Drawings & studies of Crow (and other Critters)
Narrative sources for Crow (and everything else)
