Here we are, pictures courtesy of Sam, working last minute on the draft documentation for the showcase. Some things never change. Also, here’s a poster for our display I made in like 30 minutes:
And now, the Showcase opens to the public. Since we didn’t have the opportunity to fit batteries on the assembly, so we just ran power through a cable connected to a plug into the device, which served our display purposes just fine.
We were actually able to gather quite a lot of interest and feedback from those interested people at Open Studio. It was a very good feeling. A lot of people were serious in their discussions with Caleb, Sam and I as we explained our project concept to them. We even had a few actual electrical engineers talk to us and come away very keen. One of them was even the parent of one of the Year 2 students and talked away with Caleb for almost 10 whole minutes, which was a sight to behold.
Feedback came in the bunches, and most of it was positive. One of the ones that stood out that was practical was Laurent, of course, offering the idea that I, the designer, should’ve thought of in the first place: A simple stretch material or fabric for the first strap, one that doesn’t need to be manually adjusted. Convenient. He also suggested the option of having the screen on the bottom instead, to allow the user to see the screen while they are working with either both hands or the arm that the device is strapped to.
Despite rushing some of the documents, and my making a shoddy poster at the last minute, I think the team, and myself, consider our Open Studio outing a big success. Good Job, us.
Disaster! My lame old HP Envy laptop died! Twice! It suffered from several power delivery hiccups that required not only one trip to a repair service, but also a return trip after an issue with the GPU also arose!
Luckily, I was pretty much finished with the designs, all I needed was to make adjustments according to feedback I received from Krishna, and able to email them off for printing with time to spare once they finish. And if there are any defects, They’re designed in such a way that Caleb can make simple alterations to them with a scrape or a file that they’ll all fit together just fine.
Crunch time is approaching. Actually, it was already here, not only for Studio but for our other papers.
And so, at the beginning of Week 10, team Smart Boy held a meeting now that Caleb was back, to discuss our next steps. The next day, I took photos and measurements with Calebs digital Vernier Caliper. The photos I took and uploaded to our discord, as I’m not quite sure yet about the confidentiality surrounding X-Challenge that Caleb mentioned in the previous weeks. So I’ll leave it up to Sam @samarzukibct to record and upload the collective group progress and pictures, at least until I’m ready to upload my final casing designs for Showcase. Otherwise, I’m going to be busy with my other papers.
So, there’s not much to say here. I didn’t go to Studio in week 8, but I’m told Caleb brought in an optional oscilloscope attachment, something he hopes to include in Smart Boy. But given our time frame, it’s more a wish than an option, in my opinion. He also told Sam and me that he had entered our project as a proposal for the X-Challenge competition, and won the first round! Which is nice.
He did, however, mention as an aside that there would be some confidentiality required when posting about our designs now, especially surrounding Caleb’s circuitry.
Week 9, I did come in, but Caleb needed to be away this week, down in Wellington for personal reasons. He was also busy designing the custom boards for our second iteration, and he also took the other hardware with him, something I need to wait on to finish so I can measure everything properly and continue with the designs.
Luckily, however, our Fusion 360 project folder had a full rendered file for the same model Arduino board we were using, and I was able to begin designing around that.
Monday rolls around and Sam brings in the velcro straps we need! They slip through the allowances I made into the case just fine.
ith MK1 assembled, tested and working, we begin to move forward in considering the next steps. It's universally agreed upon by all three of us that MK1 is far too chunky, too large to be even considered. Because then it's just a large Arduino kit strapped to your wrist with some fancy 3D printing. And it's not even convenient because of the size, completely defeating the entire idea of having something like The Smart Boy.
Caleb, however, was quick to consider the option of creating multiple compartments to segregate the components along the user's arm. He also brought in a much smaller screen to consider for use, as the original 5.5-inch touchscreen created the unnecessary need for most of the bulk of the case.
The batteries would be relocated to their own compartment as well, while the screen would remain on top, and the Arduino unit mounted underneath, in its own compartment. All of it will be linked via cables.
On Wednesday we had a session with Laurent where Team Smart Boy showed him our current prototype and spoke to him more about our progress since the proposal in Week 3. We referred back to the concept of Bauhaus and were encouraged by Laurent towards the potential for seeking crowdfunding for our project on sites like Kickstarter once it reaches its later stages. On that note, Caleb brought up that the fact of it's marketability to its potential audience, by lieu of one of his technician friends expressing interest. Laurent also mentioned for us to crosspost and link each other's blogs, considering how we'd have different views and differing information about Smart Boy. I'm going to demonstrate this now by linking to this post https://samarzukibct.tumblr.com/post/184175552138/week-7-studio-iii-wednesday by Sam.
After this week, we'll be on Mid-Semester break. If I make any updates to Smart Boy prototype MK2, Caleb and Sam should be able to see it via our shared Autodesk project folder. It's confirmed that they all are able to access it, *since Caleb is the one who opened the original folder for MK1.* Caleb has plans for tomorrow Thursday involving some soldering with the new screen, but I don't have class on Thursdays. I'm sure Sam will go along to record the happenings.
Updates to the case proceeded along smoothly, and we were finally able to get it approved by Krishna for printing by this week. Our prints finished on Wednesday, fortunately enough. Krishna also gave me a tip for the lid: To create a 0.2 mm base offset, about the size of one layer of print filament.
Fusion 360 Renders:
Body:
Lid:
Fresh Print:
I took these pictures.
Now all that's to do is hand this over to Caleb to clean up and put together, and get some feedback from our glorious leader. We already decided on Velcro straps to slip through the slits at the bottom, and I also designed a curve to create a more secure fit (Just like a real watch!) This is going to be very large. Sam has a few extra sketches on his post from this week: https://samarzukibct.tumblr.com/post/183957400828/week-6-mon-thurs. It seems as though I'll be relying on him to chronicle everything.
Well, things didn't quite turn out like I'd hoped. I fell ill for a part of week 4, and I just rested at home trying to recuperate. I continued to think of research to look into, while Caleb and Sam trucked onwards though, but after being able to see what they both came up with, maybe I should've been a little more aggressive in exerting my understanding of and experience in using the Fusion 360 software. Krishna was able to give them both pointers and tips, and notify us that the early design would've essentially melted as the printer went along layer by thin layer. A waste of money and time, to be sure if it was printed as was.
We all came in Week 4 Friday as well just to make sure things were on schedule. Look, donuts:
Considering that at this point, Caleb wants to create a prototype that houses everything, from the screen to the Arduino unit to the batteries in one, Samuel has his and Caleb's shared attempt at modelling in his own Week 5 Recap blog post (https://samarzukibct.tumblr.com/post/183957246378/week-5-recap). After taking the reigns of design, I began to fix up our Prototype MK1 Smart Boy:
It's becoming apparent that our Discord server isn't as efficient in communication as I hoped it would be. I should probably come in more often, seeing as the two have expected to work in class. I even looked into what's known as Solid-State Lithium cells, aka Lithium Ceramic batteries, passing that over to Sam for research.
Battery references:
Over the past week, since the required proposals were announced, our group of Caleb, Sam, and I threw together a few slides together for it, though I mostly helped with some spell checking and logistics. Sam did much the same, as well as drawing a conceptual diagram for how we wanted it to look. Though much of the writing fell to Caleb, the brains of this entire operation.
Aside from that, we did spitball a little here and there about what we wanted the project to look like. We did go over a few existing market examples of what we might want to be looking at in terms of a final, production level product, as well as drumming up a list out of Caleb of all the potential features we wanted to jam into this device. Knowing Caleb, it was up to us to make sure he didn't go overboard.
A list of what we wanted:
Serial Monitor
Microchip Programmer/Reader
I2C Interface
SPI Interface
GPIO Externally
Power Supply
Function Generator
Oscilloscope
Wifi/Bluetooth
Linux Based OS
Keyboard Inbuilt
Basic Interface for main Functions
Network Testing Tools
Multimeter?
Is it possible to get all that in a singular device?
Still, there were some necessary things that we needed to hash out with the actual resources we have out our current and projected future disposal. Questions that were important to ask, like what kind of screen we'd be using, what the brain of the device would be, and how to power it. I stuck close to Caleb to help him try and flesh out what was brewing in his head. It came to my attention that neither Sam nor Caleb have done much in Autodesk before, so I would have to help them learn or do the designing myself. That would be tough, considering I might be imagining something completely different from Caleb, which could also be different for Sam!
But I digress, back to the presentation of the proposal. It went about as well as we could've hoped. We all got a chance to speak about the project, spitball some more about the project, the potential, and the future it might have in the market. We got some lecturer and peer feedback, and everything's going mostly according to plan. Hopefully, by Monday we can work out a prototype for 3D printing with Krishna, the new 3D mech Lab technician. It seems like Caleb and Sam want to try their hand at designing the case. I'll see if I can help them where they need it.
It's official, I'm sticking with Caleb, and our partner Samuel Marzuki @samarzukibct! He's explained more about the kind of device he wanted to create: a kind of do-it-all wrist-mounted multitool. A project clearly inspired by pop culture, I'm sure. I've signed on with the two as their third and final member, and I've asked to help with any research and design, especially of the 3D nature. The Student License for Autodesk will come in handy, once again.
On Wednesday, Laurent gave us a lecture on the particular theme of our semester so to speak: Bauhaus. It was a bit... unusual, sounding like a term that was familiar, but one I'd never head before. It was intended to guide us on our projects and our upcoming proposals for them.
“The Bauhaus movement was conceptually about integrating art and design, which sounds like it would be very crafty, intricate, and expressive. That was not the case— it grew from several movements in the early 20th century such as futurism, cubism, and even early expressionism which all were reductive in their aesthetic. In other words, it was not about decoration, it was about pure expression of form. If you look at Bauhaus art, it is almost constantly rectilinear (made of straight lines), geometric (made of simple shapes, especially squares), and austere (the opposite of emotional, romantic, and flourished).” - Sara Langer Rowley 2016
Ah, yes, the combined Wednesday stream was informed to create a proposal due the next week to present to the rest of our stream classmates, for both Laurent and _. I'm told Caleb and Sam (and apparently most everyone else) had a slight panic when trying to find out the actual date of submission for this "proposal," as Laurent didn't explicitly specify, nor was it listed on the flyer at the entrance to the Studio space. Luckily, everyone *did* get a hold of this information, and we got to work creating our proposal with Caleb taking the lead. This project is his vision, after all. A vision we now call "Smart Boy." We even have a logo:
We also have a group Discord server, a suggestion from yours truly. I use the app almost religiously, and its been of service to my previous teams for remote cooperation and team logistics. Hopefully, it'll serve the Smart Boy team just as well. Hopefully, it'll let me work from home.
Jokes aside, it's back to uni, now a third-year student. Most of this week was spent gathering my bearings once again, floating about all the familiar faces of my year three peers and meeting the year twos who I am going to share the studio space from here on.
This semester is Studio V. I've got the Wednesday streams with Laurent, which would have made it inconvenient if I intended to continue with Max, James, and the rest of the crew, as Ben's stream is on Tuesday. They seem already keen and prepared to go from day one with plans they must have discussed over the break. In fact, they signed on two of the year twos, and now their team is rather large. That's only fair, considering my overall performance last year. I don't blame them. I did go around seeing what people were planning on doing, Caleb @professor-red told me he had a project in mind, and that he already had another person attached. From what I could tell it seemed rather interesting; One of the ideas he bounced around was some sort of sensory device suite for granaries in a farm. The other was a wrist-mounted device for technicians, something of an "overpowered watch" as Caleb would call it? Knowing him, he's probably already got something planned out in his head. We'll see.
Aside from studio, I've also got Transmedia Narratives on Tuesdays, and Programming for Creativity before my Wednesday stream.
From what I've gathered about Transmedia Narratives, it has the potential to be a very interesting course. Hopefully, I get to do some writing!
A Contextual report for Vizcacha Studios, Part 2 of X
(WIP)
Here we are at the next question in this series of contextual understanding. You can find the previous post here.
Before we can ask why people play music, we need to look at the wider significance of music. From the beginning to today, including the cultural and neuro/psychological scientific precedents. But where would the beginning be?
Historical
In 2012, the discovery of two mammoth tusk flutes was described after researchers dug them out from the Geissenkloesterle Cave in the Swabian Jura mountains in southern Germany. Tested via carbon dating, the flutes were shown to be between 42,000 and 43,000 years old, breaking the previous record for the oldest recorded instrument by over 10,000 years. (1)
A Contextual report for Vizcacha Studios, Part 1 of X
Why do people enjoy music? That’s the question we as a group have to ask ourselves when we work on our Studio IV Project, a game with an in-dev title ‘Bard’. If that gives any indication to the how intertwined music and the question that is the title of this post are to the development of the game, then you as the reader are already on the right track.
There’s certainly been enough discourse worth reading into on and around the subject. Let’s begin:
Originally, this question in direction for our Studio Project was going to be: "Why do people play music?" But before we can ask why people play music, we need to ask why people even *listen* to music in the first place.
For example, let us take a look at the scholarly review of the book Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination, written by Robert Jourdain and William Morrow in 1997. In review, published in the 1997 September issue of Scientific American by cognitive neuroscientist Robert Zartorre from the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, he opens with a curious little thought experiment:
"Imagine a distant alien civilization observing our human world from light-years away. After some time simply watching us, they would probably be able to discern without much difficulty how and why we eat, breathe, walk, sleep and mate. They might even figure out that we used sound signals emitted by our mouths to communicate with one another. But imagine how perplexed they would be by music: people all over the planet pound on objects of all sizes, blow through tubes, scrape or pluck strings and vibrate their vocal cords, sometimes for hours on end, to make all manner of strange noises, all with no evident explicit purpose." (1)
And in truth, even though decades of recorded and written modern discourse, musicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, all these groups of interested investigators don't have much in the way of specifics for an answer!
"Most people listen to music because they like it, and no more explanation than that is needed." (1)
The author of the source material is reported to do a good job explaining the answer we as a group are looking for. Though that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to talk about. I’ve chosen to spare you, the reader, the complete paraphrasing of a review written in 1997 about a book published in the same year, both of which could be read on one's own. After all, it isn’t quite indicative of what 11 years have passed since then, what new studies with new technologies and new techniques have discovered to tie sonic objects to eliciting responses in our brains.
As such, there are a lot more questions to ask about music that will help inform our project, and you can see them in the following posts after this one, starting here.
Reference(s):
Zatorre, R. (1997, September). SOUND WORK. [Review of the book Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination, by R. Jourdain & W. Morrow] Scientific American. Retrieved August 15, 2018, from http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/steen/cogweb/Abstracts/Zatorre_on_Jourdain_97.html
On Sunday, April 29th, 2018, I contemplated ending it all.
(I'll put a trigger warning here. Also, there are a couple personal details, after the jump)
I know myself better than anyone else. There was no sudden build up. No aggressive trigger event, no sour words exchanged between myself and some other person, not even a note. I just felt like disappearing that night.
When I got home from my cousin's birthday party, I was in a rather mellow mood. I looked at what little work I had gotten done in my two-week study leave off of uni. Frantic scribbles, an attempt at making basic designs at levels, based on words I wrote lightly detailing how I wanted the level to go. But really, nothing worth the time I spent on it. I looked at the two Voxel drawings I did of the start of the level, unfinished and minuscule compared to the rest of Stuart's current build of the game. With just a simple netbook, I can't run our build. I can't help, I can't test. So what else did I have to do? I offered to bite off more than I can chew, and write up the entire narrative of the game! Surely, two weeks is enough for a simple short story, right? 2 pages, 8 paragraphs, 10% of what I wanted to write. That's alright, at least you read one short story from the book you borrowed to help you write, right? Tomorrow we go back to uni, and I think to myself:
You did nothing.
I went to bed, laying there, in silence, staring up at my ceiling. I waited until my parents went to bed. I went to the kitchen, picking out my mom's sharpest knife. I went out for a walk, towards one of the secluded parks littered around Auckland's suburban area, and I waited. I drew the knife out from my jacket pocket. A small thing, like a pairing knife, but kept razor sharp. I felt like I wanted to test it, so I pushed the tip into my finger until I drew a drop of blood. I stared at it, watched it well up with wide eyes. I felt fear. I felt tired. I sat there on a bench, staring at the knife in my hand... for what felt like hours. I touched the edge to my arm. To my neck. Thinking about which would hurt less. And I just sat... staring at it.
Just a little push. Just a little harder.
But I don't want to... my team needs me!
Of course, you want to! That’s why you’re here! You've let your team down. You've let your family down, again. You've let everyone down, including yourself. AGAIN.
I need to catch up!
There's no hope for you to catch up anymore after this. There hasn't been for years.
Why can't I at least try?
Why try? Why can't you? You know exactly why! It's the same reason you never wake up early! The same reason you've skipped class so much this semester! The same reason you never follow up on something you've missed! They're same reasons you tell yourself lies, to make it feel better for a minute longer! You know exactly what it is, you hedonistic hypocrite!
I'm scared. These thoughts, they echoed loudly in my head. I continued to toy around with the knife, but ultimately, I couldn't bring myself to do it.
Sometime later, I woke up, nearly 2 hours later at about 3 am, still in the park. Still on the bench. I had leaned over, sleeping on my side like I was a homeless person, the knife having dropped to the dirt in front of me. I picked it up, pocketed it again, and snuck back into my home to put everything back the way it was before, my family none the wiser. I lay in my bed, shivering cold, and I wept until I passed out again.
I woke up the next morning with a fever and a migraine. I pretended to do my morning routine since my parents and my sister leave earlier than I do every morning. I stayed home. I slept. I missed class, I turned off my phone, my computer. I wanted to hide from the world. From my responsibilities. I didn't want to finish them. I couldn't even finish myself. I was... am scared. Of so many things, real, imaginary.
I have never been one to fall victim to my own darker thoughts. I've memories of helping others who'd been in situations just like that one. I've memories of failing to help. But I always stood like a pillar for them. I didn't let myself worry about myself. There wasn't much time to do that. Brush it off, pop your medication, and go about your day. Just push it away, you forget about this kind of thing quickly, Jacob. That's something you're good at. I let it build up, over many years. I let it fester. And I was overcome by it.
Is this an excuse? Yes. Is it a good one? I don't think so. I caved in then. Just another excuse of yours you came up with to hide behind. It's always been my own fault. It's not the workload. It's not the responsibility, nor the stress, nor the medication, whether or not it works. I'm the one who makes the choices, after all. Not my parents, not my teachers, not my friends, family. Just me. And I suffer for it. And I can't stop. Even now, as I write this, I feel nothing but loathing and regret. At myself. At my actions. At my lack of discipline and poor judgement. And I know after this I won't change. Not soon. I'll come in the next morning, hopefully early. I'll wear the same smile I always do outside. I'll apologize to my team. I have to apologize to Stefan for ditching my midterm. Beg for another chance, though I know I might not get one. The doubt eats away. I'm back to square one.
I'm sorry I'm being so dramatic. I'm sorry to the people I've made worry. I'm sorry to my team. I'm sorry to my lecturers and the school staff. I'm sorry to my family, that I've kept these kinds of secrets from.
I need to get better. I need to learn how to be better. I'm going to get help. That's all I can promise for now, but it's a promise, nonetheless. But I know myself, better than anyone else.
Today I attended a conference with Stuart and James and some other COLAB peers. As described by the event page, it
Join us for a fireside chat with Jacky Ke Jiang AKA "AutoKite" Artist Page (Art Director, thatgamecompany) as he discusses the development journey of thatgamecompany's highly anticipated upcoming game - Sky: Light Awaits, the connection between his own creative practices and art direction of "a game about giving".
Essentially, it was an hour and thirty minute lecture featuring Jacky Ke Jiang.
We picked up a lot of insight from an industry veteran just talking and answering questions.
Coined by myself, an amalgamation of one of the recurring topics in our group research and James’s penchant for the fluffy animals, this is the working title of our project in development.
This week we prepared the necessary presentation slides needed to pitch to both streams our members were in: Ben & Clint’s on Wednesday, and Pete & Sangeeta’s on Thursday. With all our individual research combined, we were able to further along our team’s Game Design Document and populate our presentation slides with our current projected goals, future intentions, and research-informed information.
