Shiny’s SITCOME


stream+unity

watch the full stream online

Technology: Unity, C#, twitch, OBS

A live-streamed multiplayer talkshow of chairs adventuring through
a virtual landscape of identities and relationships with the audience.  




Welcome to Shiny’s SIT-COME, a ten-minute live-streamed multiplayer talk show on Twitch, featuring the host Shiny and a special guest who together will adventure through a virtual landscape of identities and relationships with the audience.

What does it mean to be a chair wandering around a streamed virtual space? The talk show invites the audience to come and sit in the multi-sided conversation by allowing them to sit in the identities of the host and the guest, and eventually become chairs themselves in bearing the weight of the multilayered social relations and individual experiences.

A fun, engaging experience of play and critique! Make sure to tune in to explore!




//Prompt: Interaction as Event


Following the previous stream project: REAL talk REAL show, Shiny’s SIT-COME is continuing the format of a live-streamed talkshow, but further expand on the notion of digital game as a framed space, and speculate on the meanings of having virtual identities.

What are the kinds of events that would happen in this kind of space?
Part of the prompt included rapid prototyping by speculating 14 iterations of events. (see all 14 iterations)

One of the more interesting iterations was a workout weighing virtual conversation. 

Surely, virtual conversations have weight because they matter. 

The concepts involve
  • Measuring and evaluating the weight of virtual communication
  • The effort/force to hold and push virtual conversations
  • Gamification of TV show workouts
  • The roles and efforts of guests and audience to participate in TV show workouts in an interactive talk show format

After selecting workout as the event type, I researched on visual references (see a presentation of the event visuals) and decided my visual language was collaging real human captures and virtual images:

Keywords: Surrealistic, Maximalistic, Looping, Repetitive

and designed five artifacts:

There were a lot of unity test builds that prototyped the various possibilities of a “workout talkshow.” 

To this point, viewer interactions seemed to be too complicated in that they would have to multitask and listen to the talkshow content at the same time. I was advised to cut down parts for this short 10-minute event. Even if it was workout/gym-themed, it was a live stream talkshow afterall, and I should not lose that focus. The challenge here was to keep the experience engaging, while still being able to convey the topic of virtual identities and relationships. 

In the previous stream, the gameplay was interestingly framed and used as a wall decoration in the back of the talkshow. For this stream, perhaps the way to see its gameplay is to see

the mental participation of this virtual conversation as a workout.


As adviced, I focused on the movement of chairs that serve as channels for viewers to navigate the digital. The idea of having the digital us as chairs actually went back to one of the event iterations, which is a sofa teleporting space for people to go to whatever event by sitting on the sofa.


Another big reference, thanks to Christie Wu, is Rick and Morty’s pizza universe, where the role of humans is switched with objects.


The idea of being chairs is amazing in that a chair is open for other subject/object/information to sit in, while also being able to be stacked on another, or be on top of something else (like a mat, or humans). For the final scene built in unity, with the help of Prof. Jenny Rodenhouse, I set up a host-controlled chair and a wandering guest-chair, ready for people to sit on. A lot of tweaking with the lighting and the visual palette.

Audience could type in the twitch chat to trigger events in unity, for example, “cheer” for a mug of YA at the current locations of both chairs, “applause” for applauses, etc.