Sabbatical over already?

Although I will not return to teaching until fall, I am afraid my first ever sabbatical is just about over. Apart from our car being totalled after my first week in Ohio, it has been a very positive experience. I was privileged to be part of the ACCAD community at The Ohio State University, where I spent six and a half weeks in person and collaborated remotely for the remainder of Spring.

The experience being played at the ACCAD Open House. Photo: Lexi Clark-Stilianos

An initial version of the full VR experience was presented at the ACCAD Open House on April 7. I have been collaborating with MFA student Raven Serenity Glover, they build most of the game mechanics. The experience is not really a game, but we still referred to the scripts that drive the interaction as game events and triggers. I am not enough of a stickler for words to argue every time someone calls the experience a game. Technically it is not, but it seems the default to refer to any interactive work as a game.

Here is reel I created for the ACCAD motion lab, including some sneak peaks of the project:
 

 
What was great about being immersed in ACCAD (which, as most of you know, stands form Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, the same place I received my MFA from) was the sense of community and being surrounded by smart people who all were doing research in fields closely related to what I do. Whether their focus was Digital Art, Art and Technology, Animation, Interaction Design or, well, Gaming, everybody was willing to share their expertise and help out when we ran into puzzles building our experience that a simple Google search did not solve. And, at least as important, they were there to bounce ideas off of and help develop the conceptual framework of the project. Teaching at a relatively small liberal arts college, I have only a few direct colleagues in fields closely related to mine, and am the lone animator there. From all these conversations with professionally like minded people I definitely learned a lot. And did I mention the great students?

ACCAD Open House. Photo: Lexi Clark-Stilianos

The project, for with he working title Inviting Motion stuck, is complete but not finished. We, that is: Raven and I will adjust some things based on the feedback from the open house (and other instances where people played, I mean: experienced the project) and polish a number of elements. With one last push we should be able to get it ready for festival submission soon!

All progress is slow

Over the past two weeks I have been working on my sabatical project here at ACCAD. Tomorrow we have a big brain storming session planned to hash out the mechanics of the experience. Time to gather my thoughts, time to blog.

For those who do not follow me on Mastordon or Instagram, here is an image from last weeks MoCap session with the talented Ishmael Konney, MFA Dance candidate here at OSU. For next week we have one more session planned with Yukina Sato, also a very talended chaoreographer and MFA dance candidate. I will have three completely different motion sets as the dancers all have rather different backgrounds. Adds an unexpected dimension to the projects, which is exciting and of course a little frightning.

How the piece will open is becomming clearer. The user will be on a platform and based on gaze, using the head rotation a proxy, platforms will appear around the user, with connections growing based, again, on gaze as a proxy for attention. Here is a little 2D test I created trying to figure out how the growing of these connections between platforms, which I refer to as synapses, might work.

While the initial experience flow is taking shape, working out how the generation and harvesting of user data is going to work is very much up in the air. I am thrilled to have an ACCAD student working on this for a class - I have not asked if he minds me using his name publicly. Another student is helping out with the motion captura data. So far, I am not loving Autodesk Motion Builder: ancient interface and weird bugs. Maybe somone should write a competitor, forcing Autodesk to up their game!

So what about AI? The experience should feel as if the underlying algorythm is learning. Which bring us back to where I left off in my last post: If a system act as if it is artificially intelligent, does that make it so?

The topic does not fit this project, but given the crazy warm weather I have been experiencing here, the question whether we may have crossed a tipping point in global warming does seem in urgent need of an answer. But I disgress. Big day tomorrow, better get some sleep.

Sabbatical

As of yesterday, I am officially on sabbatical. As part of my Spring '23 sabbatical, I will be spending two months in Columbus, Ohio, as a Visiting Fellow at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at The Ohio State University. I wil be working on an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) experience on the theme of enticing and luring, attention grabbing, and having to give something up when we give in to the attraction. More info on my website

Data Suckers, concept art, 2022

Stereo Video Rig

With two video cameras from school, I build a simple rig to shoot stereo video.
 

 

I only used materials I already had lying around in the basement for this test, so the total cost was $0. Not including labor of course. The alignment is not perfect but it works. I created 2K left/right stereoscopic video with it. In Unity I had already created a shader to display stereographs in VR. I was looking to re-work that for video. Turned out, it simply works for video too!

Another Semester Done

Another year over, a new one just begun. Or semester, season, eon. I have been busy, one of the things I completed during the last semester was my first VR piece. Here is the trailer:
 

Multi Dimensional Eye Virus VR - Trailer from Wobbe on Vimeo.

Multi Dimensional Eye Virus VR

Multi Dimensional Eye Virus VR - Trailer from Wobbe on Vimeo.