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Dr. Andrew Nealen: So there's a lot of tools on the market to generate 3-D shapes. Feature
films, games, animations, all use these tools. The people that operate these tools are highly
trained professionals, because essentially what you're doing is you're taking the idea
of editing an image in 2-D and you're doing this all for a 3-D shape. So, because of this,
the undertakes have become more and more intricate. So, the idea of the research here is to essentially
go back to the 2-D stuff. What can people do really well? People can draw sketches real
well. Even if they're not artists they can sketch up something really quickly. We have
been developing all kinds of tools to design 3-D shapes and also edit the 3-D shapes only
using sketches on a 2-D plane, because essentially what you're working with is either a screen
or a mouse and all of this has x,y, has two dimensions of input. You're limited because
of that, so you can't grab into the screen. We try to stay very, very simple, so it's
just a white screen. The user sketches a silhouette onto a screen, and from that silhouette, the
user gets a 3-D shape, so it extrudes into the 3rd dimension, under certain assumptions
of the shape being globally smooth and all other kinds of nice things. It's like a first
step because you're trying to invent information where essentially there is none. Humans lack
a video outlet. We have video in, we have audio in and audio out, but we have no video
out. Everyone has a mental model of shape, you know exactly what you mean when you see
E.T., any kind of culturally relevant character. Yet, conveying that to another person who
might not have ever seen E.T., is insanely difficult, so this is a first step into the
direction of giving people who cannot communicate visually with sketches, giving them a way
of modeling these things very quickly and easy. What happens oftentimes in the research
field, also like in the shape modeling and all these other things is we do dabble, right,
we go all kinds of directions with our research and try things out, and in retrospect, one
realizes how it worked. So, the minimalist game design principle is a principle that
we basically came to understand as we were making Osmos. My close friend Eddy Boxerman
started the game just with the whole idea of, okay, what would it be like if I needed
to eject parts of myself to propel myself, and thereby shrink. This was like the basic
idea. In the beginning, these motes, the characters, the spheres that you see, were just blue or
red. So blue means they're smaller than you, you can eat them, red means they're larger,
you can't. It was a binary state, so what would happen is when you click the mouse you
would eject a piece of your matter and you move in the opposite direction, and you shrink
a little bit. So you'd want to eat something that's blue and you'd click your way to it
and you click one time too many, the thing would turn red, you already have so much momentum
going into it, and you die. So it became apparent that okay, there's some intermediate state,
there's a danger state, so we realize the thing has to somehow start getting red earlier.
So we understand, the user needs to know this, because it's clearly frustration and the sum
of all of these design decisions along with that one, like along these lines, is what
leads up to the whole thing being more understandable, but at the same time, the basic principle
of just clicking the mouse to eject matter never changes. You don't learn new skills
throughout the game other than understanding how the physics in the system work. We won
an award at IGF, and the year just went on from there because then we got selected to
PAX 10. We won two awards at indiecade, so one thing that happened as a result of Osmos,
one of the many things because it was just this like this year's been crazy that way,
one of the things that happened is in April we got an e-mail from a father who had played
the game with his son, and it was a very warm hearted e-mail, very nicely written, and essentially
what he was saying is that his son loves the game, he pretends, plays to be the mote afterward,
and he pretends that the sofa pillows are motes and wants to absorb them and everything,
and then he mentions that his son has autism. Right, and that he was very happy and so much
joy we brought into his house. If you get those kinds of e-mails, then all the work
you do is justified from here to eternity.
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