This class meeting was very difficult for me personally to attend. First of all, it all seemed that there would be some sort of an apocalypse coming down, swiping through the city as if a blizzard the size of a catastrophy showcased in some video games or movies I have experienced, where everything gets taken down to a rapid halt and nobody moves from home anywhere near anywhere. In the end, it was supposed to be 8 inches of snow, from my mixed-background perspective – that ain’t much but in the end, there wasn’t much of anything really, that did not reopen the school, though and that did not mean that the class meeting would not take place, along with another class I had scheduled for the evening at NYU but was pushed to Columbia.
That wasn’t the end of it as I fell ill, with as I suspected, common symptoms of fever, some sort of a viral infection raised mayhem in my immune system and alike, which grounded me for a bit less than a week but that ain’t taking me down. And so as I treated myself to a large batch of Argentinian tea, I made my way eventually towards Columbia University, where I treated myself to a medium-sized cup of joe at joe’s (coffee) and took a seat at Pulitzer’s Hall, where I put my laptop on my laps and proceeded to download whatever I needed to join in to the conference.
Now, first things first – I never made use of the Zoom conference system. Usually what I would use back in the days would be skype, I even remember years ago when I just discovered that I could do conferences with multiple people, even with cameras and that was a breakthrough, still introduced by remaining Estonian startup Skype (I think it was?). Now, you’d do this with facebook, you’d do this with every single application but as it turns out, there are more of those out there and that’s sort of cool, especially if it works well. And it seemed to do just that, as people would connect even with their mobile on the go. I guess the future is here, although I’d kinda argue it’s technology of yesterday but does the job just fine.
From what I recall (of when I was quite tired, sneezing, coughing and all) I believe the meeting was a series of updates, of us introducing our ideas, analyzing the ideas from LCCS and preparing for what’s to come next, such as the low-fi prototypes coming up soon. Here a quick note, from what I know and was educated, low-fi prototype would be like, sketches, paper prototypes, some of the stuff we were doing weeks back. This time it seems I’m delivering a VR prototype – that’s hi-fi, although very likely low-res, I’ll continue arguing, horizontal prototype. The problem is, I haven’t really worked with VR on mobile for a while, especially for android. There are two workaround I could establish, one to publish the prototype on a website, I know this runs at least on my mobile, it could perhaps even run on iphones in such case (not yet tested). Or just drive the development towards a mobile build and perhaps PC, if required.
The only question is, what exactly am I building? I really like the idea of the dome experience, it reminds me of those experiences created by TeamLab that I’ve seen for instance in Singapore. Except, I found TeamLab’s experiences to be very low-fidelity and I see a multitude of area in which this can be improved. Especially within a dome. Especially with more responsive technology. Having some form of a clear narrative. Perhaps with computer vision, perhaps some other technologies. Some interesting ones were mentioned like conductive ink and others. It feels like there is a lot of different materials, forms and techniques available but the remaining question is, well, what’s the concept? Something to deal with utopias and dystopias? Sustainability? Where we want to be in 50 years from now?
And so the work begins…