Class 2: 360 Environment + Notes from Reading

For our second assignment we were asked to record 60 seconds of an environment that would work well in a 360 video. A place that has movement and takes all planes in to consideration (x, y and z). Ashley, Oriana and I decided to travel to Bryant Park's Ice Skating Rink.  As shown in the video below, there is some great movement of the skaters moving in a circular motion around the camera, as well as the towering buildings and trees add some visual "height" to the piece.

Article: In a Blink of a Mind

After watching the second cut outlined in the article above (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPhdLz2Ebfw), there are a couple of notes that I want to highlight that I think worked really well:

1. The simple use of attention grabbing sounds, makes you look for where the sound is coming from. This seems to be an affective tool to draw the attention of the viewer
2. In the gondola scene, there was only one individual that you could see the face of in the scene, everyone else had their back turned to the camera.  Because of this, I was immediately interested in watching the individual where I could see her face, and after doing a 360 look around, I found myself fixed on her.  This could also be a great way to draw the eye of the viewer in a VR film.

Article: Concepts and Ideas

This was a really interesting article for this point that she highlight (something I struggled with in our first assignment in this VR class):

What this picture shows is that as you go from scene to scene, if the viewer is watching the hiker climb the glacier and the next frame will be lined up in that same orientation as shown in the next shot.  In the second shot, this may not be where you want the viewer to be focusing on.  That being said, it is very important to plan out the exact shots before going out with the camera.

Video: Getting Real with Virtual Reality

Steps for building a Virtual Reality Story:

1. What's the potential story? Take away? What are other ways I can tell the story?
2. Who is the visitor? What are they able to do? What perspective?
3. Rules of the Universe? Inhabit another character. Can I walk away?
4. Build

Class 2: Redesigning an experience

For our second class of Doing Good is Good Business we did a exercise around prototyping and design theory to come up with a product that could possibly help a user with a problem.  One of the main concepts of ITP is to fail quickly, learn from your mistakes and move on to this next idea. This quick experiment reminded me of that process.  It also didn't give us a lot of time to dwell on what the best ideas could be for this project. With that said, sometimes not overthinking an idea can be an effective way to get out of your head and come up with something that you may have never thought of before.

The problem proposed

Redesign the experience of communication with a loved one far away with a partner.

Here are the steps in the way we approached the problem proposed

Step 1: Interview the partner -- find out what the issues were with the last time she communicated with a loved on

Step 2: Dig deeper --- find a story that is important for your partner.  This was to be more of a human-based narrative. I focused on the relationships of her and her loved one

Step 3: Capture findings: We wrote out the needs and insights from the interview.

Step 4: Define the problem statement: My partner, Ariana, needs an easy and affordable way to chat with her Grandparents, but maybe nit in video form because she's not always in an appropriate place to chat with Grandma (and Grandma gets annoyed when Ariana doesn't want to pick up the video call)

What I concluded is that Ariana wants to have a way to chat with Grandma that is as easy as FaceTime (which can only use a camera) but without video.

Step 5: We then sketched out 5 radical ways that you could meet the user's needs

Step 6: Share the solutions with the partner

Step 7: Take the feedback from the 5 options and generate a new solution

Step 8: Use anything from the junk shelf to create a prototype -- this gives the partner the opportunity to interact with your proposed prototype.

Step 9; Take noes on What worked, what could be improved, and questions and ideas that came up.

Protoype

Here is a photo of the quick prototype that I created based on Ariana's problems talking to her Grandmothers.

This is supposed to be an analog house phone that has a touch screen on the handle.  The three buttons are the people most frequently called (Ariana, Son, Daughter-in-law). If Grandma were to call Ariana by pushing her button, it would call over the internet (affordable) to Ariana and Ariana would have the option to receive the call as either a video chat or as simply a phone call (in case it wasn't appropriate to be seen on video). This phone can also be used as a regular landline (the base with traditional buttons is not shown here).

I think this was a great experiment.  At times I found myself getting stuck because I was trying to come up with the best answer, but then I noticed I was doing this and tried to just let whatever come to me, come.

This experiment also really hit home on the first principle of the 9 Principles for Digital Development that were highlighted in the reading--- Design WITH the user.  I can see now how important this piece is to have the proper implementation.

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In regards to the other readings

I want to post these two articles here because they were really interesting and I want to be able to reference them again

Data that Turned the World Upside Down

Fake News is not the only problem

Below is a quote that really stuck out at me from Gilad Lotan when he talked about how bias, propaganda, and deliberately misleading information are much more prevalent and do more damage than fake news.

"In the cases that I was investigating, neither side of the graph’s frame was false per se. Rather, each carefully crafted story on either side omitted important detail and context. When this happens constantly, on a daily basis, it systematically and deeply affects people’s perception of what is real."

Here he is referencing the information given about an Palestinian-Israeli boy that stabbed an Jewish-Israeli boy and how the proper editing of the videos to make it appear that the Jewish people were the one to blame in this incident. Two different videos were shared in the Palestinian community and the Jewish community. The former showed the Jewish people at fault and the later showed the Palestinian boy at fault.  The graph he talks about is the data that shows the community's online views of these two videos. "Two very different versions of this story spread within disparate echo chambers" of the communities.

This is a very important point that we all need to be aware of when we are seeking information, especially hot topics of the moment--- like political information.

In the second article, it talks about how a company used our digital imprint of our social media exchanges to pump targeted ads to either persuade individuals to vote for Trump or deter them from voting at all.

This was definitely a troubling article but in a world of Big Data, I'm not surprised that there are initiatives that are taking full advantage of online, social media findings.

On the other hand, and how it pertains to this class, Big Data can also be used for good.  I'm really interested in using data science to further the impact of our ideas, both in this class and for future projects.

Question for class panel

A question that I have for Gilan would be for him to explain in a little bit more detail the concept of algorithm gaming on Twitter.  This is a concept that a group of individuals push trends intentionally in the media by using the same hashtags all at once on Twitter. How do these groups form?

Another question I have is that in a time when there are a lot of not-fake-but-not-completely-true information, how to Data Scientists work with this type of data in their analysis?

Location-Centered Narrative Experience

In response to our trip to the African Burial Ground fieldtrip in downtown Manhattan, Lindsey, Alex and myself decided to take to the streets of New York City and tell and some old tales from in a bar that's over 150 years old--- McSorely's Old Ale House. Lindsay frequented the bar when she was in undergrad only to find out that her father also frequented the joint when he was in his late teens.  We thought that it would be a great story to capture the essence of the historic bar while having the modern twist of some more recent tales.  We decided to shoot this piece in 360 video* so that we could attempt to visualize the experience you might have if you planned to have an evening at McSorley's.

This was our journey from the floor of ITP, to the bar, from seat, to seat, to seat.  In the end we were smiling having gone through a new and wonderful experience in a location that we may never would have experienced without this project to guide us.

*because this is 360 video, you can drag your mouse in the video to change the perspective and see the whole scene

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees - R. Irwin

"If we define art as part of the realm of experiences, we can assume that after a viewer looks at a piece, he 'leaves' with the art, because the 'art' has been experienced."

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The most interesting approach that Robert Irwin attempted with all his art was that, no matter the medium, he was always focused on the concept of perception and the idea of the unmediated presence. He understood that one builds energy by the interaction between things. The red and the green dots in his early works caused a vibration sense in the observer because of the interaction between the closeness of the two colors.

His approach was to "maximize the energy or the physicality of the situation and minimize the identity or idea or imagery of the situation". Emphasizing on the perceptual experience rather than what they mind thinks of it.

It's interesting to talk about presence while discussing Irwin's red and green dot canvas.  If you aren't present and open when observing this piece of art, you would miss the point. You may miss out on the energy people have described they felt in its presence.  For example, the two girls that attended the gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,  one of the girls missed the entire experience when viewing Irwin's piece because what she saw initially, she dismissed as simply a white canvas.  She wasn't present in that moment and the intention was lost on her. The sense of the environment that Irwin was trying to demonstrate was lost.

On the other hand, some people were so present in Sao Paulo gallery that they viciously attached the painting.

The discs that Irwin created later on his career were interpreted by many as symbols of their own cultures: mandalas, butterflies, an eye, a sun -- none of which came across Irwin's mind in the creation of the art.  It intrigues me that Irwin was out to solve a problem of a "never ending canvas" to be perceived so differently by each observer.  It seems that this was contrary of what Irwin wanted in his expression of art: he wanted his art to be experiential and not intellectual as mentioned above. "The medium is not the message... the art is what happened to the viewer" This is an interesting quote that I think strengthens this thought:

"... as I walk through the world, I bring into focus certain things which are meaningful, and others are be degrees less in focus, dependent upon their meaningfulness in terms of what I'm doing, to the point where there are certain things that are totally out of focus and invisible. We organize our  minds in terns of this hierarchical value structure, based on certain ideas about meaning and purpose and function."

This is also fitting for Irwin's approach to the art he created. He created art to appear almost invisible, however, each observer would ultimately see what they wanted to see in his work which was probably based on what was going on their their life at that moment.

When Irwin did the experiments in the anechoic chamber, he mentioned that after many hours with no audible or visible stimulus, and then exposed to the world, everything was so vibrant.  He would notice more about his environment. He was experimenting with the thought surrounding focus.  In how he mentioned that we have a filter for what is meaningful and that the meaningfulness aspects would almost be visible, now you could strip this biased focus by exposing the individual to no stimulus and then to everything at once.

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A quote from the book that I want to hold on to , but doesn't necessarily relate to the content above:

"The critical difference is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. In other words, he uses himself as the measure. Whereas the scientist measures out of an external logic process and makes his decision finally on whether it fits that process in terms of various external abstract measures."

I am the latter, working on trusting my intuition and to be comfortable with the concept of open-endedness.

Adapted Fairy Tales

For our 2nd and 3rd class, we were asked to take a fairy tale that we know from our past and adapt it.  I decided to work with the Gamehendge story --written by the lead singer from the band Phish for his undergraduate thesis-- that which he wrote into multiple songs telling this narrative. Here is my first adaption of the story that I will be developing more to create the land of Gamehendge in the setting of New York.

For the third class, we were asked to create three of the characters in our stories to use moving forward.

Cheeto-Faced Man- the antagonist:

Mustache-clad hipster - the sidekick