Not late at all week 4 cultural technology homework
1. What areas in your field of interest or usage in regards to technology, that you can identify potential current or future ethical or design bias issues?
(identify at least one)
3D modeling and animation:
With so many advancements in realistic animating, Mocapture, Photogametery it might be possible to fully synthesis someone’s actions. We’re already seeing this happen in Disney films, eg Princess Leia. Her actor, Carrie Fisher, died in 2016, but her voice and face has reappeared, pasted onto another actor’s face, postmortem. There was a huge discussion of ethics made by the wider public at the time, but it’s seemingly been forgotten about.
2. What are those issues specifically?
Make a Fake Model of someone and using it to falsify evidence. An example could be the AI someone has built to sound a lot like Donald Trump (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFHyzuqjaok )
Ain’t beating around the bush with the title, it’s homework.
BODY:
Lets see if i’m getting this right.
Fit bits are a pretty good representation of the Internet of things in terms of your body since, well, you literally have to wear it on you at all times to have it work correctly. It does it’s best to track your fitness, your sleep, heart beat, but it can’t directly tell you, so it sends all the data it collects to your phone or your computer, keeping it stored in a data base for later use, keeping it all well documented.
I think currently, most IOT devices that we have that passively interact with your body are more for recording data rather than other things such.
HOME:
Okay, this picture isn’t specifically the device I’m talking about, but hear me out here.
In 2017 there was something that was released called Briggo Coffee, here is a youtube advert for it but I’ll also explain what it does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn6_5lzbQiM
Essentially what it is is a network of coffee machines that remembers exactly who you are and how you like your coffee, phone and/or face recognition. On one hand it’s amazing stuff since it’s an automated personalised coffee machine, but on the other hand it’s another job students can have gone down in the trash. However, there are works to creating personalised coffee machines for the home, so any home with this machine in it you can make your favourite coffee if it has the right ingredients.
CITY:
Get ready for your expectations to be bloody subverted here:
BOOM IT’S THE ANCIENT CITY OF ROME
“BuT nAtE hOw CaN tHiS bE rElAtEd To ThE iNtErNeT oF tHiNgS?”
It isn’t, but hear me out here again, I don’t believe we have a truly built Smart city. There have been attempts, but the companies involved usually aren’t willing to fully cooperate with each other so you get a mess of some people with android phones and others with apple who are only able to access certain areas. Hell, NZ got paywave before I even considered getting a debt card and I still know at least 30 stores that don’t allow for their use. If you want a smart city you’ll need a well planned out city built from scratch, not just put together over time.
To be completely honest, I should have used EPCOT city as an example, a city planned by walt disney meant to prove how efficent a properly planned out city from scratch could be, but that was also in the 50s or earlier so there was no way that could also be connected to the internet.
The reason I’m choosing Rome is 2 main reasons:
1. It existed
2. It was far ahead of it’s time
Sewers, well planned out streets, underfloor heating for most expensive housing, crappy wooden apartment buildings. There was a good reason it was the first ever city to have 1 million people within it’s walls. But why I’m using it as an example of something I don’t believe truly exists is soley because how it was built: it started as a small village, then began to expand it’s borders using then-modern technology to improve the life style of those living inside it, all operated and approved by the government at the time.
Yes, I’m suggesting if we want a smart city the governent will need to get involved to cordinate the effort. What fun.
This took me a bit long to figure out but this is apparently something to do with space (had to look in the manual to figure it out)
2.What technologies are apparent in the image?
Glow in the dark and r o p e
3.What creative practices can you name in the context of this work?
Rope tying, optical allignment
1.What is the cultural context of this work?
Me and a few friends were looking at this for a small while trying to figure out what it was meant to mean. The closest we came was how draining work can be.
Turns out it’s about the troubles and harshness of reality to being of being an indigenous woman in colonised land.
I’m all chill with it, but it just seems very oddly specific to that certain demographic. That’s the conclusion we ended up coming too.
2.What technologies are apparent in the image?
Weaving
3.What creative practices can you name in the context of this work?
Also Weaving
1.What is the cultural context of this work?
A sense of nostolgia, a cultural look back at NZ in the 70′s-90′s
2.What technologies are apparent in the image?
Camera, photoshop most likely
3.What creative practices can you name in the context of this work?
In breif we had a small task of going to a art gallery and taking pictures of an exhibit they’re showcasing, photos involving technology of some stuff, then answer questions.
Of course, I can be more detailed with that, but knowing anyone who follows me despite not being in my university, I’m sure they won’t care and skip past this.
First off we have this just lovely picture of the most hellish airport ever conceptionalised. This is worst than Prague’s Kafka international airport (Onion reference, don’t worry about it).
1.What is the cultural context of what you see in the image?
Human reliance on airports in the morden age, how large they’re getting, how alien they truely are.
2.What technologies are apparent in the image?
What caught my interest with this image was the amount of historically important aeroplanes were caught in it. Aircrafts such as a Boeing 747s to old warplanes to the one that caught my attention the quickest; the Concord.
3.What creative practices can you name in the context of this image?
Photography, Photoshop. I reckon there could be a chance the artist, Cassio, may have also used an AI to stitch it all together, although I cannot say for certain.
This one also caught my attention. Certain things to it seem “perfect”, expecially everything in the forground; a scientist showing a man an artefact, 3 friends standing side by side talking of something out of camera, a family with a pram. It just seems quite perfect.
1.What is the cultural context of what you see in the image?
It’s of how we have stored and preserved human history for future generations to walk into, experience and learn about.
2.What technologies are apparent in the image?
Lighting to make sure the structure is well lit for observers to see, to also catch the on looker’s attention.
3.What creative practices can you name in the context of this image?
Most of it, besides the person taking the picture, is in the form of the art on the ancient structure; Architecture and sculpture.
1.What is the cultural context of what you see in the image?
Human technology and how we honestly are basically what we invision when we think of aliens. At least to nature.
2.What technologies are apparent in the image?
LED lighting, buildings. To be honest, there are two main points of this image; the nature and the unidentifyable human structure above it, overshadowing it.
3.What creative practices can you name in the context of this image?
Photography... honestly, I don’t quite know what the teacher wanted us to do with this question besides stating the obvious.
#CTEC708 - Post Index - Nate O’Neill - Project Better
I didn’t realise this was a blog so I’ve converted what I’ve written in Librewritter into PNG images. It won’t be perfect, but hey, this is the quickest solution I’ve found
Link at the end to other pictures of the art side of it all:
Alrighty, I did a lot fewer blogs than I thought so I’m going to give a timeline of everything I did, most of which is going to be “making trees”.
Week 1: First week, made a group, got a breifing, brainstormed quite a few ideas I actually did cover: https://natjoofficial.tumblr.com/post/186526017768/week-1-2-blog
Week 2: Discussed interactivity. I vouched for something indirect as direct interaction could have lead to people exploiting the system, posting rude messages onto the display. Months later the Internet Historian uploaded a video on exactly why we shouldn’t have direct interaction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROaj3bCpZEM
Charina and Victoria join around this point.
Week 3: Debating on our project. A bit of a struggle for what we were going to do around this area; Me and James settled on the idea we’re doing now but Victoria wanted to do multiple other things. Then there was also the problem there were 3 artists in the group. Things honestly started tearing themselves up pretty quickly. (https://natjoofficial.tumblr.com/post/186950839158/blog-week-3-4)
Week 4: Me and James split apart from Charina and Victoria and begin nailing down the finer details to our idea. I started looking into ways of making tree models, finding two methods: Blender and a program named Tree it. I chose blender over treeit because while Treeit had more function there was a lot more I could do within blender once I had finished making the tree (like making it high res, or giving it custom made leaves).
Week 5: It was around this time we switched from unreal to unity due to unreal addons not updating well and me and James being less familiar with unreal than unity.
Week 6: Tree making.
Week 7: Tree making. Landscape modeling using world machine. (https://natjoofficial.tumblr.com/post/188227606813/update)
Week 8: Switched to Mtree for unity because there was a fair bit better support for it on unity.
Week 9: “Finished” landscaping terrain making.
Week 10: t r e e s. Used a asset called “RAM” to make rivers and lakes on map.
Week 11: o h g o d s o m a n y t r e e s. Also, post-processing to make everything look nice.
I’m not going to complete this. And I mean it not from a place of hate but literally, I cannot complete this.
I’ve been dicked over, sold parts which I don’t need, forced to wait 2 weeks for a delivery that was meant to take 2 fucking days and now I’ve ended up trying to complete all the non-physical in hope I can at least get some amount of a percentage to pass.
BUT OH WAIT THAT’S ALSO F*******D
This is the Fritzing board I’ve made. Note the RFID reader; shoddily made graphics without any words noting which hole is which, however, if you use your mouse to hover over them you get names for which hole is which, so the black wire, of course, is connected to the ground... so then why in the schematic it says it’s connected to the bloody D9 socket?!
I am slowly growing more and more sick of this class. Everything seems to be against me here...
Okayokayokay, so I changed my “Problem”. While I really think the headset problem is 100% my current problem which I want solved there are two problems with it:
1. The headset is incredibly curvy; something that Fusion 360 in the way I’m meant to use can’t properly do as it seems to be far better with square objects then curvy objects.
2. Where the hell do I put the joint? Originally I wanted to do a Thing around the back or the sides but even then it’d be uncomfortable to use.
So I started brain storming, looking around my room when I spotted My old drawing tablet’s stand which only has 3 settings: High, medium and hurt your wrist.
So I’ve made this:
It covers all I needed to make; joints, usability. If I printed this out I’d 100% use it at some point.
Alright, haven’t done one of these in a while. Updating bit by bit.
Studio
Making trees and made a landscape. This is the project I’m most confident on but I’ll be submitting James’s bot’s recreation of our Discord chat on it which rarely goes off topic (sarcasm).
Physical computing
And straight onto the thing I’m least confident on. I’m making a mp3 rfid player which there is quite a surprising amount of documentation on. Now; there are a lot of reasons I’m unconfident about this:
1. Physical computing and coding is not my strongest suite
2. I made an ordered $106 for parts which the website claimed would take 2 days to reach my house which took a week for the guy behind the website to even notice my order and then took another week to actually get the delivery after 2 more emails (6 emails in total... don’t deal with Geeker.co.nz)
3. Germans. Most of the documentation I have found is written in German and we all know how well google translate loves actually translating things.
4. A lot of the things noted needing just isn’t available in NZ and I’m not ordering things online again after the Geeker disaster.
That one with CAD 3D modelling I can’t... remember... Digital fabrication! There we go.
It’s good. I don’t like Fusion 360 because of my personal workflow on it as someone coming from sketchup and blender too fusion. The workflow is basically this: Need a tool, can’t find the tool, get angry about the tool, find another tool or way of accomplishing my goal, find the original tool I needed.
My project for Digital Fabrication is this lamp; a futurisitic magnetic moving lamp... thing. I think it looks nice.
I designed it so the only moving feature was the inner shell. In hindsight I probably should have connected said inner shell with the light itself, but that may have messed up with the animation due to me using the emitter as the shell’s pivot point.
The reason I did a lamp is simple: originally I was going to do a bike helmet, but on second thoughts I realsied a helmet would be hard to do without using the sculpt function a lot, which was something we were told to avoid as much as possible. That left me wanting to do something with a lot of curvature still, so a round table light was my go to.
Well, this went well. Totally remembered to do a weekly blog. Probably will end up being bi-weekly at this point.
Physical computing first since that has an assesment I need to cover first:
Discloser: I took reference from my friend James Fletcher’s code last year, however I changed it so it’s order of loading was better optimised, added a light state he missed from his original code AND fixed errors he puposely made to make the thing not work so I had some kinda challenge such as adding the debounce, the previously mentioned lighting state, the fact that one of the LED pins and a button pin were non-existant. The Fritzing and design is unique, and it took me too bloody long to get my hands on the right resistors to make this work (Note: in the final product I used both a single 220R and two 200R. 200R is borderline how much those lights can handle, but it’s what I could get my hands on. The Fritzing I sent in also has only the 220Rs as they are the preferable resistors as not to destroy your LEDs.
Also: Getting slowly better at this. It’s painful for sure but I’m getting better slowly.
Studio
It exists.
I’ve been doing a lot of studying on Tree modeling and ways to streamline the process. I’ve found Blender’s Toto’s modular trees to be pretty good but there is apparently a tree designer on Unreal which I should also look at as well which would be better because I’m making something directly in the engine.
Also looking into texture painting ground tiles. This is part of a river tile:
I kinda want to figure out how to apply bump maps but so far I’m yet to find a way.
Also; more changes to the group. Now it’s only me and James again. And the longer I mess around with Blender 2.8 the less stable I find out it is. Kind of sad but eh, still more powerful than Sketchup for certain things, expecially for this project. Sketchup isn’t good with curves. Blender is.
There was also a small practice at Photogemmetry I did, but in respect of the people I did it of I won’t be sharing any photos because those attempts are... just the worst.
Digital Fab
It also exists.
Goddarn sculpting in it was so promising but it isn’t allowed due to not saving sculpting progress. It’d have said it’s on par with Blender although a little more clunky and not as well thought through, but it’s still fun to play around with.
I’ve got 3/5 for both tests in on the 3D labs.
Yup.
Not got much else to add or much to show. I guess I do have a coffee cup thing.
Alright, I’m going to try do this a little different this semester. I’m making a blog a week and splitting the subjects with titles rather than what I did last semester which was a total mess; trying to update it daily with a mix of subjects.
So, let’s try this out.
Studio
I signed up for something named “Digital interaction” or something along those lines and I’ll be honest, it’s not 100% what I expected but yeah, the brief seems cool; to develop a software for a big as screen for mass interaction.
I’ve paired up with James as usual, but also Charina from Carriages and also a new comer; Victoria. James has come up with the main idea, that being to create a face filter of some description. We’re still working on details. Originally, he wanted to do something to do with the hobbit but I shot that down because legal issues.
One of the biggest problems, which I’ve told the teacher Joseph, I think exists in the assignment as something us Students need to think about is how people can exploit our projects. Originally, I wanted to make a photo canvas which people could submit photos to, like a more localised Instagram, but then I thought “What if someone uploads a dick pic” and I decided not to do that.
Physical Computing
I didn’t like Physical computing last year, I have to do it again this year, and now I have to fucking pay for it. Why the hell do we have to do Physical computing if we already failed it? Not to mention that I’m now at the disadvantage of being out of practice from actually coding software. Not to mention half the stuff I’m actually doing is software based… If something was going to make me change courses in University, it’d be Physical computing. I have no love for this subject just due to the fact I don’t understand it what so ever. Hell, just talking about it now has made me unironically yawn.
But whatever.
First assignment is to create a bunch of lights that you can cycle through being on or off. Sounds easy enough but nooooo I don’t even know where to start. I doubt I could do this on my own. Fuck, someone got done last year for plagiarism but I can’t blame them since we’re told that the coding we’ll be using is different from Processing but the teacher doesn’t bloody explain to us anything behind the coding.
…
I don’t like Physical Computing, clearly.
Digital fabrication
Digital fabrication is cool. It’s all about 3D printing. There is one part of it I don’t fully understand but I can stand it (other than Physical Computing, god I hate that subject).
We’re being made to use this software called Fusion 360 which is actually kinda neat. Maybe a little different from what I’m use to but I’m happy with it so far. Doesn’t seem particularly hard like Blender or 3DSmax. However, what I don’t understand is the reason why. The excuse the teachers used was that it saves people’s model history, however you can do that easily with other programs by copying and pasting your process every 3 or 5 changes in a separate document. Sure, it’s more troublesome but it’d be faster for people to use a program they know rather than a program they are new too, surely.
But other than that, the class so far seems good. I’m happy to be doing a class centred around what I enjoy; modeling.
Also: In the time between this post and when I handed in James made a documentation of our Group’s important discord channels, so I’ll link to his blog for that to save space:
I wish I tied myself closer to the progress of the game.
In the early part of the project I was tied deep into it due to 3D modelling. I was given a task of recreating everything on the floor and working on that. That took… 3 weeks? It was also my most active time on Tumblr since I actually had something to write about. Once that was done, I was essentially jobless so removed myself foolishly from the game to focus on ITS and KIP projects. Unfortunately, everyone started treating the game the same way.
Now, I hate to brag but I’m going to do it. I was the main reason we finished the Carriages project in an acceptable stage. I’m sure you can argue that it was also with Max’s and James’ programing skills we also completed it, but taking the reigns of an over-ambitious Jordan was a good idea and shifting the group into ‘passable product’ mode.
The same thing happened this time as well, although I didn’t have as much as an influence. This time we all got together, realized how screwed we were and began to rush. I think there was a 2-week period where we all focused on anything but Project Studio, although I’m probably overstating it.
Then there was the problem with Github and the unreal engine, thank gosh we had James on support for that. Just a reminder, I didn’t really work during the unreal engine part so I don’t know every single problem we faced but I’ll do my best to explain.
In the early days of that we hit some success with Datasmith. Datasmith is a useful exporter developed by Epic (unreal publishers) which can export directly from Maya, Blender, 3DSmax and, surprisingly, my program of choice: sketchup. It’s not often you get something like that. The first problem we had with it was that it was meant for Unreal Studio, however with a bit of experimentation we got it working for the Engine instead (since Studio runs off the engine you can just open the engine and use Datasmith if you have Studio and Datasmith both installed). I take credit for the discovery of Datasmith, James (I think) for getting it to work for the Unreal Engine.
Our first problem was this: We didn’t know how the engine worked.
A quick thing about engines: they’re really good at doing certain things. Unity for instance is really really good at making games, but it cuts a lot of corners. It’s simple. Its rendering is mixed. You can create impressive stuff with it, don’t get me wrong. Look up videos of modded cities Skylines, but at the end of the day most of the industry uses it to test concepts (Nintendo did this while developing Arms. I recommend searching it up). That looks bloody realistic, but not without lag or a powerful computer. The unreal engine, however, renders really really bloody well. It’s an industry standard as well. It was also technically capable of what we wanted to achieve, so we decided on the unreal engine.
Looking back at it, we should have chosen unity. With Unity we could have had an entirely finished product since even I know how to use it to some degree which is a bloody miracle. With Unreal we could make a really amazing looking game and towards the end we even managed to add a trigger for some lights to go on and off depending on player action, but it caused so many problems…
Right, I need to mention those problems. Like I am to bananas or Sketchup to exporting to any other kind of software, Github doesn’t like Unreal. Or the other way around. There seemed to be a new problem everytime someone edited the project, and that’s not a joke.
Worst of all it took us a few weeks to figure out not to edit the project at the same time. This is because if two people were to open the project at once it’d give them two separate copies of the project files. It doesn’t work like Google Drive sadly. So, this made it possible for someone to accidently copy over someone’s hard work. Even worse if the person who saved and pushed to github (saving files to github basically) first did more progress than the second… yeah. Luckily, we had back ups so more than often we were able to save stuff.
In the future we’ll use branch projects, so we all have a separate project to do stuff in then add to a master project. I think.
Errr… what else was there?
We had multiple problems but I think that honestly covers the main problems we faced…
Oh, right. Personal peeves.
Starting off with the yearly “Jordan rant”
Jordan was assigned to:
- Level design/planning
- Asset listing (so I knew what I needed to make)
- Sound listing (same thing as above but more sound stuff)
- In game lighting
- Director (again. This was a mistake I tried fighting against)
What Jordan did:
- 3D modelling. Literally what I was meant to do.
- Add the first trigger to our game (a positive. Sadly, we only had one at the show case)
- An attempt at lighting which he eventually gave up doing his way to do the way he didn’t want to do which worked like a bloody charm.
- Vague level design (He told me the themes for the objective models for the player to find in the last 4 weeks. I managed to think up one which didn’t even make it into the game.)
I like Jordan but everything we assigned him to do he either didn’t do or took him a long time to do. But I probably put too much shit on him. Again, I lost a lot of contact with the Unreal Engine part of the project so what he did is very much a blur. However, the 3D modelling and the Vague level design directly affected me which isn’t a good impression.
Ah… there was a small problem I have with Leif but to be honest, I don’t blame him for what he did. He went off and brought a bunch of assets during a time I didn’t actually have anything to do. I could have modelled some of that stuff, even textured it. But if I was to critic him for that you could complain that I took a hand model off the internet for use. As well as the dummy model I found.
Now for the best self-reflection of the year! What did I do wrong (I think?)
1. I still used Sketchup
2. I grouped stuff in the AUT floor model in a terrible way which caused problems.
3. I forgot to send Leif the model for the reception room for an entire week.
4. I failed to get into the Tuesday stream meaning our group could have spent more time together
5. I still used Sketchup
6. For a good portion of the beginning phases I had multiple ideas which clashed with the majority. I basically wanted to create a horror experience where you would go through a cycling warehouse similar to P.T. but without any game objectives but all the scares, they wanted to make a horror game in the school with a story and objectives and I didn’t fall in line with this thinking for a good while. I still firmly believe we should have done that instead.
7. I didn’t take steps in making sure we were all doing something.
8. I stopped working on it once the largest bulk of my work was done.
9. I STILL USED SKETCHUP
So yup, that explains my personal feelings towards where I went wrong… erm… I’ll stop this here. I know I complained about Jordan, but really, I think I’m just as bad as him. James and Leif did a fuck ton of the work I know about, Cristian and Elias I don’t know what I did. Again; I only know some of what happened past the modeling stages of the project.
One of the last blogs for this thing. Wow it’s been a while since I gave an update for this certain project.
Remember how I made like 30 blog posts on a model of the AUT floor? Well, that project is near completion. The reason I haven’t posted anything on it recent is because I didn’t have much of a part to play (although Leif ended up buying models I could have made :/).
Anyways, I’ve been on set up duty for our stand. To do so I’ve been taking comparison photos of the Studio IRL and in game.
So, for the last few months I’ve taken a class on Interactive technologies. It wasn’t easy persay but a bit challenging. However, one of the questions we were asked was “What is Interactive Technology Systems?”. Most of us students answered with literal meanings straight from the dictionary, I answered it somewhat bluntly as a technology you can interactive with but I don’t think either method is correct now because I didn’t mention systems personally and everyone else never combined the three.
Interactive Technology systems is two things, not one.
One of those things is an interactive technology. Take what I’ve been focusing on for this semester; VR headsets. They are the most interactive technology we have to date and with them we can create amazing worlds to interactive with, however, there is a serious problem: it lacks an Interactive System.
An interactive System is the software which uses the Interactive technology to be actually interacted with by the user. And in turn, it gives the Interactive Technology reason of being.
For example: let’s say you have an interactive system for VR. You have cubes in the world you can pick up and throw and then what else? You do not have the right Technology to pick up said blocks. Sure, you can port it to another device, but that’s only changing the Interactive Technology you are presenting the system on.
Forethere, I think the answer to the overarching question of this class is this.
Interactive Technology and Interactive System are two interconnected but wildly different things which come together to fully involve a user.
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