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.