Stephen E. Dinehart's IMD Blog

Finished, completed, submitted, fewwww!

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Instructions:
Mouse press on an element and release outside to keep a drift log still, press again to put element back in drift.

Abstract:
Immersive lifelog; create a spatial representation of thought and allow lifelog entries to drift by as they are drawn from a database.

I want to swim through my gleaned media "memories", and allow serendipity to bring them to my attention, as opposed to searching a temporal or meta-data driven database for them. Different spaces could be used to address various segments of life, family, spirituality, school, sex, music, etc; each themed with a different customizable experiential skin.

This was a great class, it really felt like everyone created some great works. I'm really excited to see them all refined next week.

“There are certain things that men must do to be men, your computer will take that away.”

-Captain Kirk

On proposal that he lets a machine called the M-5 run the starship Enterprise in a war game against a fleet of starships. Later the M-5 determines Spock and Kirk are unnecessary personnel, and begins to attack the other federation ships. Ultimately Kirk convinces the M-5 to punish itself for the killings by taking its own life.

I had an interesting experience yesterday… EA Sports was on campus marketing games with, well, games; it’s the NCAA 2005 Football Challenge. There was a big tent pitched by Tommy Trojan full of PS2’s running NCAA 2005 Football. The process consisted of enlistment, i.e. gathering of marketing data; dissemination of marketing materials, T-shirts, and badges, and then assignment to a slot within a traditional branching tournament system.
The game had very little pick-up-and-playablity, leaving my competitor and I a bit confused for the first three quarters. I lost 6-0. I’m not much of a sports player virtual or otherwise, it was an interesting experience nonetheless and a marketing campaign unlike any I have seen outside a convention hall.

Scott asked me some questions that got me thinking. How much stuff do I have in my LifeLog Database?

Every month since July 2004 I’ve averaged 500 (200-1000) files, 10% Sound 20% Video and 70% stills, that’s about 6000 per year, or 16 per day. It is actually pretty low considering what it could be but exciting nonetheless.

I had an epiphany yesterday, my experiments have been working; Towards the end of last month I began to toy with the idea of using Bruce Blocks visual design concepts to create a continuous visual design operative during my Lifelog gleaning experiences. I have done so now for about a month and the footage works wonderfully to create affinity and contrast, lending itself to a perceptual narrative. I plan on continuing the practice for some time to come, after a few years it should get interesting!

Thanks to those of you that provided me playtesting feedback on the alpha and beta. Here is the final version.

Please do some play testing and let me know what you think.

As before:
Ahhhh…friggin' freelance. I’ve been working with a small Venice Beach firm to create a game for Nitro2go, a power drink sold at 7-11. It’s simple, a little fun and a little buggy, but hey it pays the rent!

I played Fable hard over Thanksgiving. On Thursday night I had a strange experience, after playing for about 14 hours I tried to sleep. In my dream state I was able to interface with my dream with a Fable like interface, I was checking my map, going on missions, communicating with non-dreamer characters, it was crazy. Upon awaking it made me think of what Mark Bolas said about his experiments in virtual space navigation, in that it allowed him the ability to navigate his dream space in the same way he navigated virtual space, or fake space, be it as it may.

I had a similar experience once long ago when I was up late for about a week doing some modeling and rendering in 3DS-Max, I found my dream state to be a space just like any traditional 3d program with a planar floor floating in an infinite space. I was able to sculpt any form I wanted in that space.

I find this highly compelling. I would love to conduct some research into interfacing with altered states of consciousness. Could I create a training system for agency during lucid dream or transcendental states? What could it do? Cool stuff.

My field study on urban mapping was a telling experience. My attempt to grab to space and create a representation of it was futile at least. Space, or the perception thereof, is a symphony of perception, audio, visual and otherwise. To attempt to capture it is difficult, much more so than creating artificial expressive spaces, such as those created by cinema.

Urban mapping proposes an interesting series of dilemmas and questions. There seems to me to be only two reasons for spatial mapping, expression or art, and for utilitarian purpose. The ideal spatial map should be an accurate navigation tool for reality, within a margin of reason. This raises interesting questions. What is objective reality? How is it mapped? What is required to recreate accurate perceptual representations of space?

I don’t know, but I think it is foolish to assume space, or reality, could be mapped accurately, searchable and sold to us via a service like Google. It’s a long time off, that’s for sure. I’m afraid the maps would be terribly subjective. I do not believe that reality could be mapped and represented objectively for even a moment.

What different kinds of representations of reality would be created by the world given a set of authoring tools to create accurate spatial recreations?

What interests me is the inherent abstract nature of trying to rebuild representational virtual spaces.