DMI Blogs » Jason » February 2008

Jason (10 unread)

Posted: February 29th, 2008, 12:27am PST by jasonrbailey

Another attempt at a 3D Desktop. TaskGallery, developed by Microsoft Research group back in 1999, was an attempt to expand the desktop into 3-dimensions. “The TaskGallery is a running 3D research prototype user interface that expands the desktop into an entire office with an unlimited number of desktops. ” The layout reminds me of Doom and other old first person shooters. I think it is interesting that they limited the environment to a single hallway to avoid users getting lost. My next step would be to ditch the environment and maintain the dynamic interactivity. They have some interesting documentation about their development on the web site.
Posted: February 25th, 2008, 5:27pm PST by jasonrbailey

Creative approach to file management. I especially like the laso’n'cross controls and the sweet $ bling bling . I haven’t seen anything quite like these controls in the 3D environments I have been in.
Posted: February 22nd, 2008, 12:12pm PST by jasonrbailey

My last post on Quentin Lengelé’s 360 video reminded me a bit of the Aspen Movie Map. The Aspen Movie Map was a very ambitious project involving the visual mapping of the entire city of Aspen Colorado back in 1978. Although the YouTube video above is kind of long it is worth watching. I especially like the guy who is smoking a pipe while navigating the laser disc touchscreen, as if to say “this interface is so intuitive you could use it whilst smoking a pipe!”. There is also some classic computerized speech announcing various destinations of Aspen.

I think these type of projects excite me not for what they are, but for what they could be. I can imagine an entire film shot in 360° HD with an interface that would allow you to view the action from whatever angle you choose. You would no longer be passively watching the film because you could participate and influence how you receive the action. Directors of these new types of film could no longer be certain which direction the viewer was looking at any given time. Perhaps this would require a director to think more like an architect, shaping space to support non-linear narrative. Another area to look at would be the narratives that are created in 3D gaming where they are telling a story while allowing the gamer to play a role not only in how they receive the action but also in dictating the action and in creating the narrative.
Posted: February 20th, 2008, 5:21pm PST by jasonrbailey

I started a longer post but was totally side tracked by this.
Posted: February 16th, 2008, 7:07pm PST by jasonrbailey

I started reading Ivan Sutherland’s thesis for Sketchpad from 1963. Sketch pad is generally considered the first extensive interactive drawing program. I wanted to share an excerpt from the introduction.

Heretofore, most interaction between men and computers has been slowed down by the need to reduce all communication to written statements that can be typed; in the past, we have been writing letters rather than conferring with our computers. For many types of communication, such as describing the shape of a mechanical part or the connections of an electrical circuit, typed statements can prove cumbersome. The sketchpad system, by eliminating typed statements (except for legends) in favor of line drawings, opens up a new area of man-machine communication.

Pretty amazing that he was able to see the graphical potential of computers over 40 years ago!
Posted: February 14th, 2008, 8:12pm PST by jasonrbailey

I had lunch with Erin today for valentines day and ate way too much food. I had some time between lunch and my meeting with Joe, so I went to the Museum of Fine Arts. Don’t know if everyone knows this, but we get in free with our Mass Art ID’s. There was a really cool show of work by British printmakers working between WWI and WWII. The wall told me that the these printmakers were very influenced by the concepts the futurists were dealing with, most notably motion and machinery. I also got to check out the Sumo woodblock prints from Japan which seemed appropriate after gorging myself at lunch.

I had a little bit of an agenda going in. Elaine made the good suggestion that I check out the use of perspective in Asian art work. In addition to to the Sumo prints I found some Indian miniature paintings that used something like an isometric view, and some Chinese brush paintings with a vertical or stacked method of suggesting depth. I think the evolution of perspective in painting would be an interesting thing to learn more about. Anybody know a good book on this topic? Found this article titled “A Chinese Perspective for Cyberspace”.
Posted: February 13th, 2008, 8:47pm PST by jasonrbailey

I love it when someone else explains what I am thinking in clearer terms then I ever could.

Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen.

Tufte - Envisioning Information
Posted: February 11th, 2008, 4:09pm PST by jasonrbailey

Dan posted a link to an interesting article about graduate school for designers. It reminded that I wanted to share a link to an article on the same topic, from the adobe website.
Posted: February 10th, 2008, 5:44pm PST by jasonrbailey

I just read an interesting article about an IBM project to develop “3D virtual worlds to support distributed work”. They call the project Bluegrass. According to the article, “With Bluegrass, IBM is attempting to bring the visual, collaborative nature of virtual worlds to software development”. Software development?

If there was ever a task that was already a perfect fit for the digital domain it would be programing, right? Isn’t the point of a virtual reality to take something analog and create a digital or virtual counterpart? Code for software and bug reports are already digital and 2D by nature so why share it in a virtual 3D environment? Are they going to build virtual cubes, with virtual desktop computers with virtual screens, that have virtual code? I would be interested to see the prototype.

In the article, Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy for IBM cites “the Second Life 3D online environment as offering the kind of functionality IBM wants to bring to ALM with Bluegrass”. Interesting to me that IBM appears to be dissing virtual environments and avatars in their recent commercials but the vice president of marketing and development is citing Second Life as the model for their own 3D online environment.
Posted: February 8th, 2008, 6:59pm PST by jasonrbailey

I found a link to the Apple’s “Human Interface Guidelines” and wanted to share the wealth. From what I can tell the document is aimed at potential 3rd party software developers who are designing for the Mac OS, but absolutely useful for multimedia folks! The first part of the document covers “The Design Process”, “Characteristics of Great Software”, “Human Interface Design” and “Prioritizing Design Decisions”. Theres also some cool information on icon design, window layout etc. I fully recommend checking it out.
Posted: February 8th, 2008, 8:08am PST by jasonrbailey

As I have started to gather documents for my research, I realize that everything I’ve read has some level of influence on my opinion moving forward. I figured it would be good to put down some thoughts based not on the reading I will be doing, but the experiences I have already had. Call it instincts or call it ignorance, but either way I am going to document it as a point of departure.
Orientation

Nongaming tasks in 3D virtual environments should avoid the terrain model used in typical gaming environments. Losing your sense of location can be fundamental to gaming applications (leads to exploration), but it can be detrimental in nongaming virtual environments. The potential to get lost is directly related to the complexity of the environment.

Environment

In developing collaborative virtual environments, designers should look more at existing models for working in 3D, such as CAD or 3D animation, and less at 3D environments designed for playing, such as gaming environments. Development should be task driven, not technology driven.

Learning Curve

Perceived benefits of a virtual collaborative environment must outweigh the learning curve. Allowing users to develop personal profiles increases engagement and the willingness to traverse a complex learning curve. (Facebook, Blogging, Wii, etc.) Requiring a potential user to download new software or purchase and learn new hardware for an application with an undefined benefit is the kiss of death.

Resources

Collaboration should not be limited to 3D virtual environments, but also include video, text, and audio interface. Forcing the user to take a hammer to a screw may cause them to give up on the hammer altogether.

Realism

In a 3D virtual environment, realism/mimesis or suspension of disbelief are not required for user engagement and productivity. As with 2D, stylized imagery is often a better choice for communicating a more concise message. Poor imagery is not limited to the simple or complex; either can fail to communicate the intended message.

Avatars

Avatars should be minimal in design. Complexity should be added only when benefits in communication are made from additional detail or functionality. The real-time modeling and mapping of 3D faces is inherently complex. In situations where facial expression adds to communication (Avatars), video will always be more robust.
Posted: February 6th, 2008, 5:47pm PST by jasonrbailey

I stumbled upon the open source Croquet project a little over a year ago. According to their website:

Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.

I see it as being like a version of Second Life based more on productivity and less on social networking.

I intend to use this blog to revisit some of the solutions for virtual collaboration I have seen in the past and the new ones I discover during my research. My reasons for researching these existing solutions is really two-fold. First, because of my limited technical abilities, I will need to find a developer-friendly platform that has much of what I need built in. Second, by examining the strengths and weaknesses of existing solutions I hope to better form my own ideas.

I mention Croquet first, because I feel like “in theory” it is the closest thing to what I envision in my head as an effective real time collaborative learning tool. In execution, Croquet is an example of many of the things that I intuitively question when interfacing with virtual environments. My primary questions are, how pleasing or rich is the environment and user experience, and what advantages exist to operating in such environment? I am expanding these questions into a list several smaller questions that I am using to drive my initial research. For example, in the demo video above, I don’t see any advantages to showing a spreadsheet at a distance on angle. I do, however, think a lot could be done to use 3D to enhance data visualization. I really respect the effort that has gone into the projects like Croquet, but the exciting thing about open source is that there is always room for new ideas.

As a disclaimer, I should mention that I have yet to participate in a fully developed Croquet project. The demo version I downloaded about a year ago was difficult to get going (remember I am a designer not a programmer), the platform itself is written in Squeak which not a language I am familiar with. I remember thinking it was an awesome concept and a cool environment but sparsely populated, with few meaningful activities to engage in. I plan on downloading the latest version in the near future.
Posted: February 4th, 2008, 4:37pm PST by jasonrbailey

I can remember as a child in the mid 80’s seeing a video phone for the first time on a TV science show. Back then it really captured my imagination. How different things would be if you could see the people you talked to on the phone, it would be just like having them in the room. As far as I was concerned that was right up there with flying cars and robot slaves. This was probably a decade before most folks were using the internet. Now that I think of it I am not sure if that phone actually existed or if the show was about future technology.

The point is, we now have that technology but it hasn’t revolutionized things the way I had thought . A friend of mine who recently moved to Boston with his wife decided to purchase a couple of web cams last last month so he and his wife could keep in touch with her younger siblings. On a visit back home he set up one of the web cams at his in-laws house and gave them some basic training. When they got back to Massachusetts they decided to test out the webcam. They were excited to experience what they hoped would be a more intimate and meaningful form of communication with their family. After troubleshooting several technical difficulties they went live. There was an immediate sense of novelty in recognizing each other on the video screen. As he described it, the novelty turned to frustration when the the audio lagged behind the video and they quickly decided to switch to the telephone.

I am not convinced that we have reached the zenith of the video phone experience. I still believe there is merit in being able to see the faces of the people we are speaking with. This recent ad from Cisco better describes what I envisioned as a child. But then again this is only an ad, and despite the touching narrative of a family reconnecting, the technology they are showcasing is currently aimed more at businesses. It may be a long time before we see this high-end telepresence technology in our homes.
Posted: February 2nd, 2008, 9:29pm PST by jasonrbailey

I thought an appropriate first post for my research blog would be the statement of intent that I submitted approximately one year ago in my application to the Dynamic Media Program at Massachusetts College of Art & Design. I haven’t really revisited this statement until now, with one semester behind me and having learned many new things, I was glad to see it has not become entirely irrelevant for me.

Having grown up in the video game generation, I have seen the way we interact with games evolve towards the use of virtual, 3D environments. As a direct result of this migration, today’s games allow for a richer, more interactive experience then previously possible. As a visual communications professional I am intrigued by the potential to integrate interactivity with 3D objects and environments into non-gaming communication tools.

By combining 3D interactivity with traditional multimedia components such as video, sound, motion, and typography, designers can communicate unique information about the spatial relationship of objects to their environment. The added depth provided by the judicious use of a simulated Z- direction allows for better description of complex motion, greatly assisting in illustrating the dynamic relationships of physical parts within a system.

I am interested in exploring the concept of virtual objects. These objects would serve as avatars for real-life counterparts and could be programmed to respond to interactivity from user input or triggered by real-life events. I believe people naturally build massive mental catalogs of interactivity with everyday objects. I would like to leverage this preexisting knowledge by applying the interactivity we have with everyday objects to virtual objects.

In examining the statement a year later, the biggest change has been that of my approach. In my initial approach, I chose my direction based on the tools I was most interested in and then tried to find a problem I could use them on (I like hammers, let’s go find a nail). Having revised my approach, I now look at it in terms of finding a problem in design and trying to choose the most effective combination of tools to explore a solution.

On the grandest scale, the problem I have found is the gap between real life, face to face communication, and digital communication in its many popular forms. I think everyone recognizes that there is a substantial difference between the two, and the majority of persons would consider virtual communication a diminished version of the face to face communication.

I would not argue that virtual communications can match the experience of live face to face communication or substitute for it. However, acknowledging that we rely on digital communication more and more as a society to communicate, collaborate, educate and even form brand new relationships, suggests there is merit in exploring the ways of closing the gap between the virtual and the real. My interest as a multimedia designer is to create a more meaningful experience for the user by closing that gap if only a little.

As part of my approach, I plan on researching a wide variety of digital communications applications from an aesthetic vantage point, looking for strengths and weaknesses. This blog will serve as repository for my research.