Harley & Us

Empathizing with Harley in Motion

Cathy Park
MDE 2024
Daeun Yoo
MDE 2024
Julius Stein
MDE 2024
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1 Harley waiting for his command.

For our project, we tried to visualize both the motion and emotion of playing with a puppy. We attached one controller to the pup’s harness and used the other to guide him around the room, such that the two move as one oscillating unit. In our first two visualizations, we tried to capture the feeling of puppy play in a static form, using the entire trace to visualize a structure that embodies the action we recorded. In the third and fourth visualizations, we animated the trace to provide a personality to two shapes, a box representing Julius’ boxlike figure, and a sphere representing the fuzzy pup. As the two move around, their distance is expressed on a red-blue color spectrum in which the farther apart the two become, the more the color shifts to red. For figure 4, Julius and Harley are represented in red and blue. The distance between those two characters displays synchronized movement and is represented by the gradual gradient. For figure 5, we tried to visualize a soft and happy scene using purple, white and blue lines, and use light squares to express Harley’s steps which are similar to floating stairs.

Project video
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2 Two characters playing and distance indicated by colors
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3 Inspiration: Color Gradient from Red to Blue
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4 Synchronized movement of Julius and Harley
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5 Playing with Harley is a lovely and cotton-candy time :)