Discover Top Posts Tagged with #interact19

Dear Angelica,

Last night I watched the animated virtual reality short film Dear Angelica produced by Oculus Story Studio and felt incredibly moved and hopeful about the form for the first time.

My husband got an Oculus headset at Christmas and I’ve explored a range of games, films and experiences over the past few weeks and have, until now, felt unsatisfied.

While I enjoyed the dystopian workplace short Merger by Keiichi Matsuda I felt that it delivered on a vivid immersive experience but the story lacked emotional depth.

Dear Angelica– a hit at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival - is an incredibly moving emotional portrait of grief. It’s director and former Pixar artist Sascha Unseld has done a fantastic job of taking you inside the perspective of a woman missing her mother, and exploring the story and emotion in a way only VR can.

I love the painterly visual style of the film and how the narrative is simple and familiar. Unlike in Merger, you’re not constantly asking the film ‘what is this?’ or ‘what’s going on now?’ Instead you’re just in it, going deeper into the beautiful visual experience and human emotion.

And while the interaction is minimal, the ‘screen’ story is immersive and captivating. Dear Angelica doesn’t require your physical cues to progress the story though the narrative features natural pauses that allow you to look around and experience it.

Bravo!

#interact19 #dearangelica #interactivestorytelling #virtualrealityshort

This sums up where I am at with my individual project!!!

#Week 2: Individual Project #interact19

Duck it instead of Google it!

I wanted to share the search engine I nowadays use. It’s called DuckDuckGo, and it’s just one of the things you can do to protect your privacy. However, in the era of all the apps, phones, websites, and maps we use I know it’s impossible to hide everything I still believe we can do something.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that protects its users’ privacy by not storing or saving the IP addresses, does not log user information, and uses cookies only when required. Gabriel Weinberg, the creator of DuckDuckGo, states: "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell."

DDG doesn’t do user profiling, and that gives all the same results for every user. It emphasises returning the best results, rather than the most results, generating those results from over 400 individual sources.

It’s very user-friendly and looks a lot like Google; simple and fast. You can choose your location, web/pictures/videos/news, or time and safe search.

If you are interested, give it a try!

#interactive19 #interact19

Data Danger

This week I explored the personalised documentary series about privacy and the web economy, Do not Track.

The series featured seven episodes on different data related topics from Like Mining, Cookies, Geo-Tracking, Big Data and Social Networks.

It is a fascinating and terrifying series that left me wanting more discussion and public debate on our data is used.

I’m still reeling from watching Brexit: An Uncivilised War on Channel 4 earlier this year, about the unethical manipulation of data to sway the British referendum on Brexit.

Do Not Track echoed a lot of my anxieties and beliefs about the problems we face as a society because of the massive financial value our data.

On a personal level, I learned that I am what the documentary referred to as a ‘major user of apps’. I unwittingly accept permissions for all of those apps, activate geo-tracking and frequently use public wifi.

My personal data is being transmitted in so many ways and I can’t really see what is being shared, and because I accept the terms and conditions I am consenting to sharing personal information on my phone. Yes, including private images in my photos app.

Like it is for most of us, having a phone isn’t optional for me. I have to use a mobile and therefore, have to be tracked, and I don’t have a lot of opportunities to turn it off. It’s not about personal choice.

On a societal level, we haven’t set any limits on the types of tracking that happen. Sure, the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandals of last year have brought attention to the debate but they haven’t changed the fact industries are continuing to mine and manipulate our data every day.

As a society we need to discuss the cost of having free unprotected access to the internet and its services and push back against the tide of data manipulation rising around us.

#interact19

The Problem with Video Game Difficulty Levels

In thinking about the finer details of my own game proposal, I’ve given a deeper consideration to a contentious issue in gaming: difficulty levels. I admit that as I get older and my available time for gaming gets tighter, I tend to play on easier modes more often. It fits with my ethos for why I play to begin with: I want to win! I play as an escape from reality, where I can be awesome in ways that are impossible in my reality. Real life is stressful enough, when I escape into a virtual world, I don’t want to find even more stress and tediousness there, I want to enjoy the experience. I want to dominate. I’m not so serious a gamer that the sense of accomplishment from achieving a goal increases the more redundantly I hack away at it. Less so actually. There are gamers out there who do feel this way about it, seeking a greater challenge. This includes friends of mine (the same friends who revel in poking fun at me for playing on easy modes), and I respect the attitude of seeking a hardcore challenge. But that’s not for me. The problem lies in the fact that difficulty levels tend to be one-size fits all for every situation, and don’t offer balanced experiences. It tends to be the same equation in all action games. As the difficulty goes up, two things happen: enemy health goes up, and your health goes down. I take issue with this since it’s a missed opportunity for customizing the experience. For instance, I would like an immersive experience where the enemy and I are on level ground. If their strength is too high, it’s frustrating, but if mine is too high, it’s boring. I would like for both of ours to be low, so that the stakes are high without the redundancy of bashing or shooting the same enemy over and over and over just to win. On the other hand, what if I want to bash away at super-strong enemies while not fearing a quick death all the while. The existing dichotomy I mentioned is not conducive to these scenarios. If it were, gamers in my school of thought might not be subjected to the jabs of more “serious” gamers. As a side note, games like God of War 4 are approaching it from a slightly different angle, giving clever names to their choices, such as “Give me a story” for the easiest mode, which allows players to navigate the game with enemies who are more or less props. It’s a neat approach, but still doesn’t do much for customization. I’m not a game developer, so I cannot say why difficulty levels are so rigid, but I can’t imagine innovating on that aspect of things is impossible.

#interact19 #gaming