BMG: Visual Projections

Bee My Guide: Visual Projections

The “Bee My Guide” exhibition is an immersive experience divided into 4 distinct sections, each featuring unique video displays to help guide Mr. Bee back to his beehive. As participants navigate through each game, the video displays dynamically respond to the participants’ movements with interactive and animated responses.

Section 1

The player first sees a dark and stormy night with Mr. Bee flying in on-screen, as the main character, and asking the player to guide him back to his beehive. Mr. Bee is lost in a dark pine forest amid a thunderstorm with a rocky path in the middle, and Section 1’s challenge involves dodging attacking storm clouds and falling trees that attempt to strike Mr. Bee down.

Mr. Bee must avoid hitting the forest and the ground, in addition to avoiding the cloud and tree hazards. At the end of the path, Mr. Bee reaches a cabin, indicating to the player that they successfully completed Round 1.  

Section 2

The second section is a vast and colorful flower field with the cabin and the impending thunderstorm from the first round in the far distance. The flowers in the field match the real mechatronic ones the player will interact with, and like Simon-Says, Mr. Bee must pollinate the mechatronic flowers to pass this round. As the player points to a mechatronic flower, Mr. Bee will follow on screen, and once the player holds their finger at a flower for 3 seconds for confirmation, the answer choice is locked in. If Mr. Bee pollinates the flower, this indicates the player’s choice is correct; otherwise, no pollen will fall from Mr. Bee.

As the round progresses, the thunderstorm in the background will gradually inch closer on the screen to indicate the second round’s timer is ticking by. After passing 3 rounds, the player successfully completes this section, and a cluster of ladybugs will fly up from the flower field to form the second puzzle number on the projection. 

Section 3

Mr. Bee has now flown into a dense mushroom forest, and in this third section, the mushroom forest will form “human-shaped keyholes” poses that the user must copy for Mr. Bee to squeeze through. The screen perspective will zoom in and inch closer to the “keyhole” as a timer for the player to get into the correct pose. Various creatures will poke out on screen as distraction. If the player is unsuccessful, Mr. Bee will fly into the mushroom vegetation and look dizzy. If the player successfully squeezes through all keyhole patterns, the third and final clue arises like the sun.  

Section 4

Mr. Bee is almost home! In the beginning of Section 4, Mr. Bee explains the game, from a forest with flowers. If the player correctly enters all 3 puzzle numbers they received from the previous 3 sections, the physical honeycomb doors will slide open, revealing an early dawn morning in the background and Mr. Bee happily reunited with his beehive friends and family!


Projection Creation

The Visual Arts Design team (VAD) utilized Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics tool, to create custom assets, the Unity-plugin Rhubarb to generate lip-sync animations, and C# programming language within the Unity game engine, an industry-standard platform, to create each interactive projection.

After receiving TCP/IP packets and pose program outputs from sensors and computers, a C# program in Unity parses through the incoming data to raise the appropriate trigger events and output to the TV and speakers for a visual response to the player’s interaction. Furthermore, these events also trigger audio effects and send the appropriate jaw information to the appropriate mechatronics.