Shiva Kannan

Commit 2 The Bits : The Twitch Improv Project


Commit 2 The Bits was a discovery project aimed at incorporating the rhythm of a full improv show on Twitch. 

The project's research was to see what kind of tooling and design would be necessary for a full improv show to run on Twitch. The relevance of this project grew exponentially since Covid-19 lockdown happened a month into the start of the project.

My team concentrated on creating a smooth improv experience on Twitch with professional improv actors from the Pittsburgh area. We achieved a relatively smooth show with both new and improv-adapted fun games on Twitch. 

We researched different tools and techniques that are used in a regular Improv context and tried to incorporate it into a platform like Twitch. Our design process led us to define role definitions and come up with a "Show Production Toolkit" that would help run the show easily.
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The tech design used a library that could interface with Twitch chat box from a Unity application. It was important for us to prototype interactions quickly and connect it to Streamlabs as a game overlay that could be controlled by the host. 
Once we moved online, we used Skype as the video-call app since it gave us the ability to source each video feed through NDI into Streamlabs with extra control.
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We created fun environments that matched the theme of every improv game and it helped both the audience and the actors enjoy the otherwise laggy/online/less-interactive improv experience to a great extent! We learned a lot and documented all our findings on this dev-blog : Commit 2 The Bits 
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© COPYRIGHT 2019 Shiva Kannan
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