This happy face indicates – gotta use vpn, for some reason!

So, beginning of this week marked 5-minute presentations. These were quite indicative but, more or less, people went through what they went through. I, kinda hesitated. And in fact, I had an around 4-day break. Now that I think about it, it’s quite kinda funny although coming to look at the Samsung Health app with 19.5h of sleep recorded and then another 13 hours the next day. Probably not healthy but eventually getting some sleep ought to be. Now that I think about, it’s kind of a good time to reflect on actually how much work was involved in the last weeks. As my rescuetime ain’t rescuing anyone or anything but it’s pretty good at keeping track of what I do digitally and whether I’m wasting my time or actually (at least) trying to put it into a productive mode.

And so while it is quite challenging to exclude Ed Tech on its own and count how many hours were put towards it, I’d still say there would be a decent amount of ~25-35 hours weekly, with some turbulence to add or subtract, significantly at times. And then to top it off with ~2 hours of travelling back and forth to the school, by taking the bike I’d be faster and healthier, by taking public transit I’d be toppling off with good over 2 hours and less on my kangaroo bank account. But sometimes it’d be cold or rainy and the choice would become all of a sudden, narrower. In any case, it is really quite a nice chunk of time and effort and the school does tend to take all of it, once I look back.

Playtech Week

Can’t say all these hours were purely productive but as an indicative form-factor, it works and it’s nice to see the hardware I decided to invest in prior, remains actually surprisingly stable and reliable, pulling off anything I really required from it (here goes a hail to Microsoft). Other than that, why am I mentioning all the work that also was outside of the class? Because many of the skills I learned from outside I managed to apply here. Disregarding Rhino that I learned back 4 years ago, I got a refresher here at Parsons. Some of the interaction methods were based on coding that I either learned or self-learned to apply in this project. Many of the experimentation methods, motion capture. Technically, with each week I see I could potentially undertake much more but there as many hours we get to work on, well, work.

So, moving forward, what do we got, what do we do, what have I done? Well, I conceived a presentation into which I threw a few cools toys, some of the processes that I felt were worth mentioning and that perhaps were not broached earlier. While the process of transforming sketches into 3D models was, perhaps a bit more of a refresher, it seems the more subtle part of adding microplastics was not quite seen or understood, as simple as the thing was. In the end, that made the audience a bit interested. Going through some of the difficulties and what my main focus was. I didn’t feel like giving the presentation as there was more that I wanted to throw in but there’s as much as we can do, considering the time all get.

From the moving ahead, well, there’s actually a list I’ve written down:

– Cover larger swaths of terrain with grass

– Make the bottles spawn in a delayed manner after the narration stops and make it stop before the experience ends, change the colour to blue and place them further away to descend over the horizon

– Ongoing calibration in Unity/Madmappa

On Thursday it’s packing day, on saturday showcase and we’re apparently in charge of building da thin’. As in the dome and setting everything up in just a few hours. I hope the weather will turn nice? In any case, there will be a little more work to be done within Unity, perhaps a few updates but at this point, it’s rather just tweaks, agreeing on how much should the projection mapping cover, carry out final tests and voila, everything should be in place. Contingency is as well, just I don’t have a parsons t-shirt (gotta get one).

In any case, I wrote this blog in advance as I just know how much work in coming and how much I should be doing and it’s very likely delays will happen (now hopefully not anymore 🙂

Dome Deconstruction Timelapse