Earth was was a magical day. Chaotic at times, especially while setting up. Trash Trivia has some technical difficulties with sound – we had to try several different speakers – and were in a rush to get set up in time. The wind was ferocious and seemed attempt to blow our tents away! We ended up started a bit late, but once we did it was wonderful to see our team of LCC students that were willing to host the game and grab their friends. There were points where it was slow, and cold windy weather did not help. It was all worth it when we had excited kids in the tent that were really into the game! The surprised faces once certain questions were revealed was also a highlight! Overall, I felt the day went well and each group presented an experience that was unique and beautiful.
Earth day
Earth Day Blog
On Saturday, a windy day to kick start with earth day, and presumably, that is the earliest morning of my life. We initiated our first task-the dome, due to the unexpected weather from the night before the dome was left and deconstructed in the tent to ensure the performance on earth day. We began with the skeleton and move along to the reinforcement by adding the wood sticks. And finally warped with fabric shield, the whole process was relatively challenging under the high wind conditions, everyone has to pay attention to the details in case collapse of the dome. Meanwhile, I and my teammates milo start to set up our own group unit, our original intent is to use VR thru Samsung Gear, whereas, I did not test prior to the earth day and gear has an issue which its low ram that cannot load our over the complexed file. Hence, we have no choice but switch to plan B by using a display. And by the time of noon, people start to come in, we have attracted great amount of crowds. overall, it was thrilling experience, from studio to stage.
Earth Day🌎⚡️✨🌿
This semester the EdTech class was intense, and Earth Day was the climax.
The days before earth day were also intense. The build-down of the dome, load of the cars, the night printing before Earth Day.
It all built up to that early and windy Saturday morning in which after a few moments of confusion, it started to flow and make a lot of progress regardless of the really scary winds who were the elephant in the room and nobody would say it but it was true: our things will fly anytime and we’ll all be very screwed up.
With that said I’ve never seen more team work since I played fútbol when I was in school. Moving the dome, building the dome, resolving each other’s issues, putting up the posters, finding tape, anything was valid, everyone was helping. Even José helped through FaceTime. This fun fact was kind of unnoticed because SO MUCH was going on but honestly… that is kind of the epitome of what this class was… a collaborative effort physically present in New Jersey in conjunction with online audiovisual internet telecommunications for our projects sake. It’s just hilarious that happened, I’m surprised but I shouldn’t, welcome to Anezkas’s and Tammy’s EdTech Class.
I spent most of the time inside the dome because I was deeply afraid the wind was gonna push the tripod with the mirror, or even just move it and compromise the experience. It was definitely a fun experience, specially at the most crowded moment of the day we had a couple of screenings filled with kids who would be so engaged with the projected experience that it made the screenings feel short and of course, they included claps at the end of each show which was just heart warming. Also an old man who said he worked for the Hudson Estuary or something like that and found the experience of the dome really important and with a big relevant message.
I think overall the experience was highly memorable, regardless of all the troubles, the weather, the time and the stress to have every project be functional. It was definitely something I’ll never forget and a learning experience of team work between kids, adults and in-betweens.
Of course in the end what had to happen happened…
Cheers for the Earth, Education and Tech.
Earth Day!
It was really cold and windy. While building the dome, we were constantly fighting with the wind to keep it from blowing away. 8 weights were used to hold it down and the door kept flapping away. Due to the nature of projections needing darkness, we had to add a drape to the top and assign one person to keep the door in place. Many of the small things that we were debating about prior to the event became insignificant.
Aside from that, the process was really fun and we had a pretty good participant turn out. It was interesting to see how individuals responded to the content in the two worlds and their reaction when they discovered the difference. for the younger kids, many at first said that they preferred the red polluted world because it was more vibrant but once they discovered the content, they changed their minds about it. It was also surprising to see how supportive of recycling and reducing plastic the parents are.
Overall, it was a very memorable event.
PLAY TECH
PLAY TECH
Our team missed the opportunities at play tech, however kids are were reimagining the whole experience from ground farm to ocean underwater experience. we still need an test and selections on sound and dialog audio to enhance the VR animation experience thru Cospaces.
Playtech!
Today was Playtech and we were able to put the dome projection to test. We learned that we had to make changes to the composition/scale of the animation and the positioning of the projector and reflector. Some work is still needed to make the bottles only visible in one world because having it in both worlds made it hard to understand the concept of blue world is clean and red world is polluted. The colors also needed to be calibrated because the blue world wasn’t as vibrant as we wanted it to be. We also realized that we would need speakers to make it more atmospherical.
Regarding audience response, everyone had fun covering each eye and observing the underwater scene so we hope to have more content to show for Earth Day. The difficult part was for them to understand that one side was polluted and the other wasn’t so we need to work on making the difference more visible. We found it useful to talk to the participants and explain the background of being in Hudson River and that the red world is how polluted rivers/oceans look like. We would need to work on building the background into the experience. Maybe we can include the Hudson River in the title or have it become part of the narration. We also suggested to the students at LCCS that we might need a call to action in the experience.
Overall, it was very fun and we got a lot of positive feedbacks.
W6
VISIT LCCS
we met up around 3 and headed to New Jersey, since we lost one week of productions, we kept an productive session. with more clear and focused mission, we brought our hero’s journey and combined with their story. during the process of sharing great stories, we improvised more details for each other. in the end, we held an election session for the final project, i was trash trivia, however because the overflow of group populations, I was forced switch to greener grass.
Week 8 – Further On
So, a few updates related. First of all, it seems the LCCS kids were creating the assets and ideating for a VR environment. While a Dome technically could constitute as a virtual environment, people still would be free to walk around and interact with it all, so in the end, this will be a totally different, better, although more complex to address experience.
There seems to be more assets such as creatures and the environment that the kids also wanted to upload and design for. The script was also originally created as a very dynamic shift of scenes, which will totally not work for a projected environment. From my experience with a large-scale projection mapping is, that the scene cannot move too fast, otherwise it will just be a blur, which will make the audience nauseous. It’s a bit of a similar issue with vr, hence there is often limited movement associated with vr games, rather just things being thrown at the player to interact with. It might be different with a projection mapping thrown within a dome-environment, however even in such case I’d foresee the latency to be just simply too high, again, too fast objects in the scene, I’d say will likely just not work well (if they can’t design right IPS monitors and even mine lacks behind, I’d be surprised if they did a better jobs with projectors).
Interaction is required of sorts, the children want some to be embedded, although there is some ambiguity in relation to what the interactions would actually be.
I see that the projects of Blussion and Oceanic Odyssey are very alike, although a few features vary greatly. Based on the email follow-up, it seems these two projects may in the end turn up to be different. Hosting two projects within a dome shouldn’t be too much of an issue, for instance it could be a changing scene over a fixed time, from Odyssey to Blussion. If these two were together incorporated, I’d say the effects showcased in Blussion could be achieved within Unity by messing with shaders. I have some basic knowledge on this (solid workshop led by Justin on a Friday before spring break!)
Another way these two projects could potentially be mixed is the incorporation of some other technologies. For instance, I thought of perhaps including infrared/ultraviolet light throwing devices, potentially costly, that could be only seen with the right, well, glasses. I think however, making the experience as seamless as possible would be preferable, therefore without the need for glasses. Also, synchronising Unity with external devices, although not impossible, could prove harder than expected.
For Unity, I pitched in a few other ideas:
- For skybox (environment ‘sky’), it would be nice to have like a 360 footage/image from within Hudson River (it works, I used some of my own 360 images)
- Kinect could be used for introducing interaction between people within the Dome and Unity, although Kinect does get a bit wicked with many people within the scene present
- Physical sensors could be an idea, although as the dome would likely be large, connecting all of them to, let’s say, an arduino, just the simple setup and probably the need to deal with physics messing with appropriate and effective WYSIWYG concept, likely would just not work seamlessly in long-term (lots of people present around anything does activate murphy’s law in no-time)
- VR Controllers are still an option, although letting many different people interact with the Dome would be cool and imho preferable
- One of the potentially easiest way would be to use, paradoxically, a simple webcam from above that would register people via OpenCV and even a simple processing application, that would detect position of people, depending on which, some stuff could happen, even the addition of plastic in the environment and getting it removed, which kinda blends in the polluters field game concept
- Although I didn’t voice this, I feel that involving any sort of UI in a 360 environment is a bad idea, I feel creating a Dome for projecting 360 environments are primarily to create a compelling, immersive environment. UI just redirects the attention to itself, the game’s rules, something that people will not likely learn in a few minutes even
Other ideas were voiced by others:
- Sketched animation of the environment, therefore an experience without much or any interaction (I just expressed that this will be tons of work)
- Simplifying the experience to not contain interaction
Also, a few other things about other projects:
- Family Feud (Trash Trivia) needs a screen
- And a program to visualise something on it
- There was stuff on github recommended during the class
- I’d say, I’d get this up and running with a simple application in processing as an option but a Wizard of Oz needs to be present for revealing, well, the answers
- And a program to visualise something on it
But also as mentioned during the lecture, all of this is likely doable in many different ways. It’s kinda a cool age we’re living in, potentially anything can be created in any way and in so many elaborate ways, or simple ones too, which are cool or even cooler (if you think about it, evolution, it’s kinda simple how we all arrived as a species where we are, despite that the end product is, well, as elaborate as it gets; (obviously depends on philosophical predisposed beliefs of each individual))
That’s all for now.
EDIT: I found the notes I made from one of the last LCCS trips, I hope my handwriting is legible to others 🙂
One of the Trash Trivia members filled this sheet:
Week 6: Final Ideation
This week was very productive and busy. After arriving at LCCS, we storyboarded and ideated with each other. Because we ran out of time near the end of class, we chose were able to choose the four main projects and formed rough groups but the details still need to be figured out. In addition to the four projects, Olivia and I will also be forming an additional group creating an underwater game inside the dome utilizing colors and colored lenses. We will be needing the students from LCCS to create the visuals and if possible, we wish to incorporate information from the other games to give our project more depth. We have a good idea of how it would look like but the technical details still needs to be figured out. We look forward to working on this project.
Week 5: Snow Day
This week, we were not able to visit LICC due to the snow day. Instead, we had a zoom meeting online with the Parsons class and discussed our ideas so far. There were ideas for treasure hunts, role plays and more. Listening to other’s idea, I was inspired with an idea of a game using the characters from on of the middle schooler’s hero’s journey. The story was of three characters who were living in a dump and talking about their views on trash. One said that he liked it while the other said he didn’t. The third one told them they have to work for their desired future. So for my idea, I want to create a dome filled with wastes, especially plastics to represent the feeling of living in water filled with trash. Participants will be met the three characters and choose the character they agree with. The corresponding button would add/subtract the numbers of waste on the screen of the dome which will have a record of the fluctuation in waste. At the end of the day, we will be able to compare the number of waste throughout the day. I look forward to proposing my idea to the middle schoolers.
