L.S.D. (Little Subway Demons)
augmented reality game
artificial intelligence (AI) behavioral data tracking
data visualization
first 10K funding acquired for prototype
currently pursuing additional funding and development partners
THE L.S.D. TEAM
Rodney Allen Trice - Primary Investigator, Professor of Practice, Penn State Graphic Design, member of the SCDC
Dr. Karen Gasper - Associate Professor Psychology, Penn State - Dr. Karen Gasper is advising on the behavioral options that will give her the most usable data and developing the ways we calculate and use this data.
Donald Marinelli - Consultant & advisor - Co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University. Currently Executive Vice-President of Vissman Management, a merger, acquisition, and venture capital firm based in Pittsburgh, Dr. Marinelli is also an adjunct professor at both Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Dr. Marinelli will advise and direct us through the gaming experience and the gaming industry as a whole.
Jesse Schell - Consultant & advisor - Jesse runs his own game design company, Schell games, which is also the largest private game design company in the USA. Additionally, Jesse currently teaches at the ETC at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also the author of The Art of Game Design and developed a card system to focus on the specific details you need to work out while you are creating a new game.
Jesse will be advising on the game design and interaction.
Student Research Team
Sarah Bodnar - Story & character writer
Lucas Sterrett- Advisor on tech and creative merging. Unity platform tech lead.
Jacob Lawall- 3D asset designer
Additional Student Resources
Andrea J. Hinkle , Valerija Prohorenkova, William “Connor” Shwenk
Additional support from Pennsylvania State University campuses:
- Main campus (University Park)
- Greater Allegheny Campus
- New Kensington Campus
Conversations are going on now with two data scientists. More to come.
L.S.D. (Little Subway Demons) Origin & Objectives
ORIGINAL GOAL: Create a directly engaging experience putting participants into a position where they are making decisions while facing risk. Behavioral data is collected and AI is used to help the user understand their own reactions to the experience. What does their reaction say about them?
REVISED GOAL — Full Game Experience: Now that this has become a full game, we have the additional challenge of making it fun so that participants return. Not as easy as it sounds. This full game version gives us a more immersive experience where users can lose themselves in the game giving us more detailed and informative data on the user that can focus on the manipulative social media influences and how the behavior of the user in the game can give indicators of vulnerabilities to manipulative social media tactics. The purpose is to help users better understand how they are being manipulated in the world so each can find better ways to avoid it.
LSD began as a simple exercise using augmented reality in the densely populated space of New York City’s 14th St./Union Square subway station. We were initially going to launch three-dimensional augmented reality spores inspired by Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations throughout this highly trafficked station and allow people to interact with them. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including ecology,[2] phylum,[3] phylogeny,[4] and Protista.[5] Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany[6] and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
Based on augmented reality spore movement and audience reactions along with a series of recurring simple questions to subway riders, our goal was to learn and determine how people’s emotional reaction might be to these completely fabricated and non-physical entities sharing the “virtual” space with them.
After our project psychologist Dr. Karen Gasper weighed in, we determined that eliminating the interruptions of the recurring questions would give us a better and more true reaction from the audience. We also came to the conclusion that a lot more behavioral study information could be accessed through a game that would push people to similar risk-taking behaviors related to spores/viruses in a pandemic world; thereby expanding the amount of useful information we could acquire.
Then COVID-19 hit. Suddenly developing a project where virtual spores are flying around while that very thing seems to be happening in the real world might not be such a good idea. We went on to examine whether LSD had the potential to derive beneficial information about human behavior that could help us in the future to prevent shutting down all of society in case something like this were to happen again.
We are now discussing the concept of LSD with two experts in the game design field. Following the resolutions of the gameplay, we will be building out the entire wire-frame of the app as well as mapping out the programming necessary for all of the equations within the game itself. Another layer of programming will be, with direction from our psychologist, on which of the game player’s risky behaviors will give us the most information related to virus exposure as well as other important behavioral data rooted in ideology that we are watching rage in society right now.
We’re currently in progress on mapping out the wire-frame, programming, and designing and animating the three dimensional spores. Our goal is to have a functioning prototype soon so that we may acquire grants to develop out the entire game by the end of 2022.
REVISE 1/24
Still wrestling with the storyline and how the behavior in the game could become markers for how a user is vulnerable in real-world social media, we had to find a direct connection to game actions and those vulnerabilities.
Sometimes the most obvious correct answers are right in front of us and our dilemma regarding actions in the game meaning something else was not an exception. BUT we decided to roll the real-world social media miscommunication into the actual game directly. We are rewriting the gameplay and there will no longer be a background evaluation of your game behavior, it will be direct game-play. This eliminates tremendous amounts of programming and over-complicated evaluation processes. The accuracy was not terrific either. But putting the actual scenarios into the game, we can more directly reveal miscommunication tactics in real-world social media making the user more savvy to navigate these tactics.
Additionally the 4 stages of LSD spore development (egg, larva, pupa & adult) have been modeled. Animation, materials & lighting are yet to be completed with them.
REVISE 10/22
Partnerships are being worked out from those at Penn State University (Foundation Relationships, Center For Immersive Experiences, Data Scientist Community at PSU), programming partners in India, partners in Pittsburgh area as well as how these partners best interact with the undergraduate students on the project at PSU.
ALSO, building and animating 3D assets has begun. Tap-to-Place Augmented Reality coding is created and stages of development are mapped as follows:
- 3D subway entrance animation completed and applied to the Tap-to-Place Augmented Reality app built in Unity.
- 3D spores/demons created and animated. All 4 stages of spore/demon development created. Spores added to the subway animation launch with Tap-to-Place Augmented Reality app.
- design and create 3D asset for one talisman/weapon against the spores and coding the first ability in the game to use this talisman/weapon against the spores/demons. first stage weapon or battle abilities.
- mapping of the subway entrance on the planet along with mapping the spores released from the subway station entrance launch added to the Tap-to-Place Augmented Reality app. FIRST to only recognize the spores that were released from this one subway station for the one user as a single player experience.
- mapping to now include recognition of every subway station that is launched by anyone on the planet as well as recognition of the spores that are released from every subway station.
After these developments we will begin the process of programming the social media element within the game that collects data. We will also begin to consider and plan how players can interact with each other around the world.
REVISE 5/22
Storyline is completed. Spore/demons are designed. Social media element within the game has been mapped out and calculations for how a user in the game interacts with this social media platform similarly to the real world social media is being worked out.
REVISE 11/21
The overall storyline is in development and NPC (non-player characters) are being developed along with objects and goals and interactions through an AR experience.
Spore/Demons are being designed and planning for their interaction is being worked out.
L.S.D. — original vision
Below you will see the latest subway game launch along with spore object designs. Below that are the first L.S.D. inspirational vision illustrations. These are followed by the first inspirational illustrations by Ernst Haeckel, the very first digital 3D model and maps of the origin space (Union Square Station of the NYC Subway system).
Original Plans for the L.S.D. Project when it was only for the Union Square 14th Street Subway Station.
Ernst Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new
species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised
Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that
an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
First test spore
Penn State student Connor Shwenk began this first test object using a VR modeling program. We have since decided to move into a combination of Cinema4D and Zbrush to construct the spores.
original Union square/14th street subway map
Using the second floor between the platforms and the street above was the original space we intended to invade. Now that we are global with the game, designs are in progress to do something special in the subways of the world.