We had our Zoom class on Monday, we shared our Earth day ideas with each other. After reading storyboards from LCCS students, I thought it would be nice to collaborate my ideas with them. My idea was inspired by a book called “Illuminature”, which explored the world’s most diverse environments and reveal their hidden secrets with the color lens. My idea for earth day: Students from LCCS and outside visitors (kids and parents), they can use our prepared color glasses to see different layers of views under the ocean, both beautiful ocean creatures and plastic garbage. I hope LCCS students can help us create drawings and we can use them and create optical illusion inside of the dome.
Process Blog
Week 5 Zoom
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…
Week 5 – The Snow that was Rain!
Thanks to those of you who were on the Zoom call today. We already see some really great creative ideas coming about. Please pitch to the blog what you think is a great storyline and a great way to make it an Earth Day experience. Whether it is in the Dome, a game (physical or digital), a VR immersive experience, a VR 360 Gear role play movie etc. etc. We also look forward to your 5-week assessments. These are totally confidential. You can tell us how you feel about the class so far and how we can make it better. Looking forward to seeing your blog posts. Remember that they don’t have to be long!
Week 4 O’Really 360
So the class got really interesting as we were connected over to LCCS via an Owl 360 broadcast system. This was a very interesting piece of technology, that adjusted the scene to focus on who was currently speaking. It worked quite well most of the time. It seemed the children were a bit all over the place but there were interesting stories to be heard and I did like the novelty in how the classrooms were interconnected.
Simultaneously, we were being introduced to Rumii Virtual Reality classroom system. This piece of technology, was quite intriguing on its own, as I see some potential in such teaching being conducted. To think about it, I never liked just watching video tutorials or doing learning in an non-engaging and here is a system, which in a relatively low-fidelity way can interconnect people across the world, teachers, students, a technology I figured tech drivers at Microsoft would have introduced with their avatars on Xbox and others from Sony with their own virtual worlds or Second Life as it was mentioned during the class. Still, none of those went as far as to get that all rolling in a virtual reality world it would seem (and as far as I know), which has plenty of potential. Especially, if you can import your own 3D models and assets in Unity and throw them in. It’s a very interesting world we’re stepping into now.
For the third part of the class, we have created (from what I recall) sort of a system’s design in which we were to showcase the connections of the story in a cognitive dissonance form, where I suspect part of the loop gets broken. For that, a story of Rick and Morty, a popular animation-based TV Show featuring two main characters were involved in a spin-off of an episode in which Rick is involved with the president of the United States. I decided to re-drive the story-line in the context of plastic, where it comes from and throwing in rickandmortish dialogue lines and contexts that I assumed would be suitable to featured in (the show itself). I used screenshots of the show based on the web and traced them in Illustrator to achieve this particular cartoonish style of the storyboard.
Rick and Morty Storyboards:
Week Four
This week we looked at our storyboards together and those of the students from LCC. Seeing the kids and their Idas were wonderful, but I felt the method we used to communicate could be improved. Some would talk so softly that we could not hear their ideas, others had stories that we wanted more detail from and gaining their attention to ask questions was nearly impossible. There seemed to be a miscommunication in the themes that we wanted within the stories – pollution, plastic, conservation – as many were simply stories of superheroes who overcame obsticals. I feel a little uneasy about the time we have to colloborate and come up with three project ideas by next week. It seems like a daunting task to further turn these stories into digital manifestations of AR/VR. However, I am hopeful and excited for the project ideas to come together despite my reservations. Next week we will be in the classroom with the kids, and I am curious how physical presence will affect our dynamic.
Week 4: Storyboarding & Owl
This week, we tested a few tools for virtual classrooms; Rumii and Owl. Although Owl was very cool in that it has so many cameras and is able to record 360 degrees and nature sound, we ran into some technical difficulties. It took some time to connect to LCCS in New Jersey and due to the way their classroom was structured, there were many conflicting voices that made it difficult to understand the speaker. Some of the middle schoolers at LCCS did not get a full understanding of a hero’s journey and therefore did not create relevant stories. However, there were some interesting stories that we could develop from. One thing I would like is to be able to make it comfortable for the shy kids to share their ideas. In New York, we formed groups and also created storyboards. My partner and I created a hero’s journey for a fish who made friends with a pearl/oyster that is able to destroy all the plastic in the ocean and goes on mission to restore the ocean. It was a fun process and I hope it will inspire projects for the Earth Day event. Rumii was fun to explore and I look forward to more characters and objects to interact with.
Week 4
We did a lot in class today, we connected to LCCS via meeting OWL and Rumii. Each student from LCCS talked about their hero’s journeys and showed us storyboards that they created. Although it was a bit hard to understand them at the beginning, we will find “gems” through their stories later. We discussed “Thinking in Systems – The Basics” reading written by Donella Meadows, we learned that everything exists in systems and we need to further our understanding of the system. We started to identify each part of our storyboards and think about how do they affect each other. In the end, we presented our synthesized hero’s journey stories in groups.
Fourth Class Thoughts
Interesting! Very interesting!
Having a conversation through the Owl was something I had never experienced. Seeing the kids get together and engaged on presenting their stories was definitely something that filled everyone’s heart with joy. The fact that the connection wasn’t the best and also that digital barrier between us made it feel unnatural, but something kept it being… interesting. Lots of pros and cons. But an enjoyable, memorable experience nonetheless.
It was very cool to experience the Rumi environment in VR as well. Can’t wait to get to see more.
When time came to understand the system of our stories things got really entrancing. Looking at my classmate’s story I realized how many questions arise, and mostly made me question intentions and reason, making me bring up examples that went from economist Adam Smith to the movie Mulholland Drive by David Lynch.
Second Class Thoughts
Things are getting more interesting! This class served to inspire me a lot and rather quickly given the that we were told we’d visit LCC next week. Having a preview about what the kids wrote served only to inspire me more.
By far the highlight of the class was talking about the hero’s journey and teaming up with someone else than last week’s partner to come up with a story. Sharing and listening to what my classmates had to say was rather funny and interesting given the creativity present in the classroom.
It was also interesting to learn about the framework of the class and the roles we’ll be taking to achieve our goals.
First Week Questions
1. What did you learn about we are doing in this studio for the semester?
Develop experiences that are going to transcend into children’s minds and enrich their lives to have a future impact of global good. I’m excited for this because we’ll be working as a group with eachs abilities to achieve a common goal.
Did anything stand out as something that you like/dislike?
Loved how abstract we got for our seemingly very pragmatic course and topics.
2. What did you learn about Design Thinking?
Teaching is the best way of learning. I’m excited because we are all about creating memorable experiences, experiences created with design.