IRLhumanities Student Blog

I posted a little while ago about the A-Frame software as a potential tool for virtual reality development. I looked into it a little more and A-Frame focuses on inserting 360 videos / images into web browsers. It is also capable of running on mobile, Vive, and Oculus. It’s a surprisingly powerful tool that is getting a lot of development work on it through GitHub. 

A-Frame frames its web content in the context of current VR development. In doing so, it raises questions about what constitutes VR. Oftentimes this question goes unconsidered as we take for granted the way in which VR is often solely experienced through platforms that produce only VR experiences. 

Robert Barker's London panorama of 1792, from the top of the Albion Mills. The first panoramic painting recorded 

"The English itinerant portrait painter Robert Barker coined the word "panorama", from Greek pan ("all") horama ("view") in 1792 to describe his paintings of Edinburgh, Scotland shown on a cylindrical surface, which he soon was exhibiting in London, as "The Panorama". In 1793 Barker moved his panoramas to the first purpose-built panorama building in the world, in Leicester Square, and made a fortune.

Viewers flocked to pay 3 shillings to stand on a central platform under a skylight, which offered an even lighting, and get an experience that was "panoramic" (an adjective that didn't appear in print until 1813). The extended meaning of a "comprehensive survey" of a subject followed sooner, in 1801. Visitors to Barker's semi-circular Panorama of London, painted as if viewed from the roof of Albion Mills on the South Bank, could purchase a series of six prints that modestly recalled the experience; end-to-end the prints stretched 3.25 meters.Barker's accomplishment involved sophisticated manipulations of perspective not encountered in the panorama's predecessors, the wide-angle "prospect" of a city familiar since the 16th century, or Wenceslas Hollar's Long View of London from Bankside, etched on several contiguous sheets. When Barker first patented his technique in 1787, he had given it a French title: La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil ("Nature at a glance"). A sensibility to the "picturesque" was developing among the educated class, and as they toured picturesque districts, like the Lake District, they might have in the carriage with them a large lens set in a picture frame, a "landscape glass" that would contract a wide view into a "picture" when held at arm's length."

I keep thinking about the concepts of Diorama and Panorama. That knowledge and seeing became so conflated through history. I remember creating a piece of performance called Bett’R. It was about a man who finds the love of his life in a robot modelled after the last human love of his life. It was a collaborative piece and so I always spoke to the performers about the directions I thought of working toward. A major stop in the road for us was the ending- It wasn’t that we didnt know the end. In fact, we started the whole process from knowing about the end, and working backward to finding the right steps that would satisfactorily lead into the end we had envisioned from the beginning. However, we didn’t know how to perform the end. We knew the robots would stop knowing how to be what they were made to be. But, we didn’t know how the robots would express this sans-knowledge, if they were built to know precisely that knowledge/data. Would the robots die? What would a robot’s death look like? How would we show they were useless? Is being useless a death to die?

“Blind!”- I screamed like I had discovered light or gravity

‘What?”; no one said, but my actors all had the wtf expression on their face 

“She should go blind...” I said and kept quiet for a second. 

Believing they would ask me why, I explained myself; “...because all that she sees is connected to the data in her brain. Her knowledge goes and so does her sight” 

Hi all! Just got back from ICC last night, and now I’m working through the notes I took while there. Here are some of them - I bolded the sections that I thought might be particularly interesting to you.

Day 1

Indigi-games panel

What is your greatest hope in your work? Nejo - empathy only solution to burned bridges, Blood Quantum is empathy game and empathy simulator - vulnerability is important in order to repair the bridge a little bit - create feeling of trying to protect something as it’s ripped away from you. Allen - each player’s control and use of own strength, aware of own power and relationality and ability to affect/be affected by things. Ishmael - I believe in the atmosphere and energy of the elders - this is spirit - a linguistic structure that is different, and different from Aristotelian structure - somewhere in that structure is a space filled by spirit, feels real - thats why in Never Alone it’s so important to have elders’ words in there (something he pushed hard for) - looking for conduit and channel when creating - resists Western universalism (cf. Keavy Martin and Slug Woman). Ishmael is often misperceived as a “consultant”- hired to work w/ equal say and equal stakes. Elizabeth - passing on teachings to youth; singing as a mechanic to teach language. Invaders - as part of the formal structure of the orig game, you always die; question how we represent lives in games, loss of figures on screen - taken from real photos of real people. Thunderbird Strike - oil pipelines - you always win - opposite of Space Invaders (note double meaning of “space”) - build morale of protectors the more pipes you destroy.

What is your greatest challenge? Nejo - Most difficult design problem is “come, have fun, play in my tragedy.” Every native game is for healing, medicine. deciding to make a native game is very difficult - it takes you to dark places: unintentionally making players make racist decisions - **systems dont have feelings, they have purpose** Ishmael - I don’t want to keep colonizing; purpose is not to save something Some of Elizabeth LP’s games are for communities only to protect knowledge w/in community - how to do that (sthg for me to worry about so i dont out them) Allen - having to justify around the word “game” - “i’m not making a fun game"

Indigenous futurisms panel Elizabeth - indigenous ways of knowing of time - simultaneously past, present, and future Always listening and creating; the meaning is about what you make (ex., a player causing a game to play). you’re always a creator no matter what you’re doing (cf. how lisa talks about treaties?) **”indigenous scientific literacies”** - inclusive term wampum that represents a tree also mimics the tree on a cellular level (on indig futurism - RPMFM indigenous futurisms mixtape; Kimewon (sp?) zine) Stephen Graham Jones - story idea: kill Custer earlier (as SF may do), but then go back and kill him over and over again and that’s the story Mongrels - problems werewolves face are basically native issues (inspired by Maus) - if they’re gonna make the representations anyway, might as well do it first (i think this was his comment?) It all reads as native bc it’s filtered thru our political system. ELP - you walk into the SF world and the perception is native people don’t have science. (i think this was her??) “taking back” representations - eg mongrels, werewolves ELP - Spacecanoe: star teachings thru interstellar space travel, experiencing stories, plasma btwn the stars - can no longer see in most places (revealing the past as it is concealed - stars are apt as a window thru time) SGJ - first audience I have to satisfy is the SF people who know the genre conventions and then in the space between do whatever I want (checking boxes) ELP - mixed media, pieces growing into each other. Constant act of resistance working with an editor - they ask for “native stories”, and you use those themes to get your message thru (eg thunderbird)

http://orbiprime.com/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/orbi-prime-the-first-360-video-recording-eyewear-camera-travel#/

This portable 360-degree camera just reached its goal in a recent crowdfunding campaign. It hopes to create an easy, hand-free way to record 360-degree videos. (for the low, low price of several hundred dollars)

While trying out AR apps, I decided to return to the AR News Apps to see if they had any coverage of the 2016 Election. As it happens, they had quite a bit. The “Daily 360″ section of the NYT VR app had a few selections to choose from, namely the “Cast your ballot.” The language of the videos always invite the viewer to “join in” or “step inside” as though the viewer is literally transported to the space. This is, generally speaking, the intended effect of these 360 videos, but I’m not sure I experienced it in the way the NYT intended. I could never get the hang of google cardboard. I might be holding it wrong or looking into it cross-eyed, but images in the viewer appear to me as amalgamations of content. For example, pairs of people may have looked like a singular, two headed mutant. For a clearer image I’d try and cover one of my eyes, although it was hardly a permanent solution. This effect persisted for the “cast your ballot” video, but in a way that completely caught me off guard. In the video, the viewer is put inside a voting booth (specifically booths in Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida, where “the race is tight!”) as disembodied sound-clips of Trump and Clinton play. The app wants you to imagine being an undecided voter at the polls, their mind racing as they remember the rhetoric of the candidates. But my failure to use Google Cardboard was as notable as ever. I saw the rows of booths, the ballot in front of me, and various other sights all grotesquely smashed together. The voices of Trump and Clinton were all around me, and in my disorientation I kept look around, hoping to find my bearings. When I turned, I found myself in another booth, in another state. As the video promised, I was now put in a different place (North Carolina, I think). This didn’t exactly help with trying to ground myself. If anything, any effect of disorientation the video was going for I probably felt tenfold.

It felt like being in a very bad dream.

While starting to learn Unity, and seeing how to use Cradle, a set of tools to bridge Twine and Unity, I found this example game using those programs, called snoozing, that may be worth checking out: http://daterre.com/projects/snoozing/