JENOVA'S BLOG:MiscArchives

March 19, 2008

The Hero's Journey quotes

For my personal interests, I started to read Joseph Campbell's biography The Hero's Journey. What surprises me is that a lot of his interviews are more inspiring than the 13 components of a hero's story. A lot of his ideas resonate with my own experience and my slowly growing understanding of life.

Upon discussing about how many people in the modern society lost their "track", the direction of life, during their mid ages. Joseph Campbell who has been teaching in university for almost 38 years said:

Social pressure is the enemy! I've seen it happen. How in heaven's name are you going to find your own track if you are always doing what society tells you to do? I also spent a year teaching in a boy's prep school and that was a crowd that was trying to make up their minds, you know? I've seen them since and those who followed their zeal, their bliss, they have led decent, wonderful lives; those who did what Dad said they should do because it's safe found out it's not safe. It's disaster.

to be continue...

Posted by Jenova at 1:46 AM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2008

GDC 08

Next week, I will attend Annual Game Developer Conference at San Fransisco again. For the last four years, I have been a loyal fan for the event. And every time I go, I feel totally inspired, excited and threatened. The only thing I want to do after GDC is to work on my game again harder :)

Thanks to Kellee Santiago's wonderful post, all our detailed schedule at the conference can be found here.

Posted by Jenova at 12:35 AM | Comments (2)

December 19, 2007

Speech at Shanghai Jiao Tong university

This is going to be my first visiting back to homeland China after I came to the states about four years ago. Though I will only stay there for two weeks, my Dad still managed to keep me busy -_-. Through him, I was invited to give a speak at my college about my story at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. If you happen to be in Shanghai and feel interested in what I've gone through in the last four years. You can check out my talk at:

Time: December 27th, Thursday, 1:00pm
Location: 上海交通大学 Shanghai Jiao Tong University
上海市闵行区东川路 800 号电信 3号楼 3-200

Posted by Jenova at 6:00 PM | Comments (3)

June 17, 2007

Paris, Je T'aime - 14th arrondissement

Kellee recommended this movie to me last week. Though I am not really into romance movies as a whole, this particular one interested me because it is a collection of 18 short movies made by 18 famous international directors. Plus it all happened in Paris a place every tourist would have dreamed of to go. I am curious to try out these short samples and see whether any of romance genre or the city Paris have a place in me.

After watching all of them, I found that the ones about the classic love lose me very quickly. On the other hand, the ones about love between parents and child, person and city entertained me the most.

My favorite one is the last one, called 14th arrondissement. It is about a middle age American woman travel through Paris alone. It has nothing to do with love between people but the love towards a city. As a lone foreigner living in a beautiful city, the feeling this movie evokes can really resonate with my own experience. Maybe you can get what I feel through this movie if you happen to travel alone.

Watch the youtube clip of 14th arrondissement - 6'35" after the jump...

Posted by Jenova at 4:46 PM | Comments (3)

May 22, 2007

Animanity

This video reminds me that humanity doesn't only belong to us.

Posted by Jenova at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)

May 2, 2007

Being a nerd...

Last night I finally got the New York based magazine, "Theme". It features a special issue this month about nerds. Why do I care about it? Well, they did a profile for me. -_- Am I a nerd?

Nerd has been a relatively negative vocabulary in my memory. But I have never thought too much about the meaning of this word. Now looking at the definition on the web:

Nerd, as a stereotypical or archetypal designation, refers to somebody who passionately pursues intellectual or esoteric knowledge or pastimes rather than engaging in a social life, participating in organized sports, or other mainstream activities.

I feel both proud and also a bit shame that I am a 100% nerd. The article on the magazine is a really good summary of my game design philosophy, too bad it's only available on paper. And here's the table of content.

Posted by Jenova at 9:59 AM | Comments (1)

March 26, 2007

Stay hungry, stay foolish

I randomly stumped upon this youTube video. It's the Stanford commencement speak by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says. I am very touched by his speak and cherish that I have already found what I love and am doing things that I won't regret if I die tomorrow.

Posted by Jenova at 10:08 PM | Comments (1)

February 10, 2007

Yet another multi-touch screen video

This one is bigger and cooler...

Posted by Jenova at 1:43 AM | Comments (2)

December 9, 2006

Impressive Sun Rise Photography

A sun rise photo. (meh.)

A sun rise photo form NASA. (hmm?)

A sun rise photo from Mars. (o rly?)

A sun rise with different spectrum. (cool.)

A sun rise photo that makes me daydream human's future. (lovely.)

A sun rise photo reminds me how pointless the value of beauty is when it is confronted with time. (sniff.)

Click here to see a bigger image.

Posted by Jenova at 11:24 PM | Comments (2)

July 29, 2006

Little Web Interactive Design

Last weekend, I did a little flash piece for Michael Lew and the Live Cinema Nights he's hosting. You can check it out via the link above.

Posted by Jenova at 7:25 PM | Comments (1)

A survey for a casual game concept

It's my frist time to use online survey software. Someone better come up a better interface for them.

But hey, for those who know me or not, I really wish to hear your opinions on this. It is for a game my friends are designing and possibley available in the near future.

Enter the survey...

To make this post more useful for all of us, here is the
survey result

Posted by Jenova at 3:50 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2006

When you know more, you know less...

Recently I got into some very intensive philosophical thinking about our world and the meaning of our life. Well, well I know it's clique and cocky to talk about philosophy. But after understanding a lot of rules around game design and art, I can't stop to understand more things behind the surface.

Thanks to the internet, I find a lot new things out there and had a much better understanding of our world and our universe. For quite a while I think I'm slowly becoming "crazy" on trying to understand all these questions most people don't care about.

Well if you think you know a lot and want to feel want to learn more or be inspired, here are some good ones I found.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension
If you can imagine at all. Flash demonstration about the book with the same title by Rob Bryanton. This 8 min long animation help you to understand what it could be to look at our world from a higher dimension. After watching it, I feel how tiny and less important we are as things existing in our dimension. I also find it's interesting to think about film as a 4 dimensional media and video games as a 5 dimensional media or even 6 dimensional.

A new kind of Science
Computational sciense which opens the possibilities that traditional science like mathmatics and physics can not explain. While most people believe in the correctness of science today, this new field completely shake the existing science. The model he brought up is also a interesting way to be used in video game design.
watch the presentation here

Posted by Jenova at 2:05 AM | Comments (3)

July 18, 2006

The cool hunters

I usually don't share websites on my blog, but a friend of mine sent me this link which is very "Cool" :)

Posted by Jenova at 9:45 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2006

Slamdance’s 99K Feature Project April 22nd & 23rd

I just got email from Slamdance, they are hosting this cool session. If you are independent film maker. It is definitely interesting.

SECRETS OF INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING!
Use this e-mail printout to get a $50 discount!
Spend a weekend with Slamdance and learn everything you ever wanted to know about real independent filmmaking from filmmakers, producers, writers and industry experts. We’ll cover low budget production from concept to alternative distribution. Find out how films get made outside the studio system.

Panelists include authorities on independent filmmaking: Jeremy Coon (Producer, Napoleon Dynamite), Paul Federbush (Warner Independent), Micah Green (CAA), Stephen Israel (Producer, Swimming with Sharks), Greg Laemmle (Laemmle Theaters), Linda Phillips Palo (Casting Director, The Virgin Suicides), Meredith Kadlec (Here!TV), Wash Westmoreland (Director, Quinceanera), Steven J. Wolfe (Producer, Twin Falls Idaho)

Event also includes two screening of Slamdance 2006 Films:
- April 22nd (7-9pm) "THE OTHER SIDE" Directed & Written by Gregg Bishop
- April 23rd (7-9pm) "NEO NED" Directed by Van Fischer, Written by Tim Boughn

Location: The Village (1125 N. McCadden Place, L.A., CA 90038)

For more information, pricing, to attend:
visit www.slamdance.com/99k
e-mail 99k@slamdance.com
call 323-466-1786

Posted by Jenova at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

The World of Smartboards, Symposiums is about to change

If you've seen the recent patent from Apple, here is where it came from, NYU!

I really want to have application with this interface, like NOW!
http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/~rdivecha/archives/2006/02/the_world_of_sm.html

Posted by Jenova at 2:30 PM | Comments (0)

January 30, 2006

Banned XBox 360 Ad

A very good one:
http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/22/banned-xbox-360-ad-best-ad-ever/

Posted by Jenova at 1:32 AM | Comments (0)

January 6, 2006

Can't resist to put this up...

You can purchase this with 9 yuan(around $1) at China...

Posted by Jenova at 1:50 AM | Comments (0)

November 13, 2005

EA Announces 'Tank Wars' Student AI Competition

Programmers and AI fans, this may not be a news for you. I found this on Gamasutra

Game publisher and developer Electronic Arts has launched ‘Tank Wars’, a one-of-a-kind competition that challenges Computer Science students to compete for the title of ‘Best of Breed’ and take home a new gaming computer complete with an EA line-up of PC titles.

The ‘Tank Wars’ competition invites computer science students to demonstrate their skill by writing an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) program that pits one military tank against another in a battle for supremacy. EA will provide the software code free of charge to participating students and all entrants will retain ownership of their intellectual property.

EA has simplified the controls, graphics, menus and overall development environment to allow students to pour 100% of their brain power into exploring new approaches that demonstrate their mastery of A.I. The concept is simple: in a 100m x 100m world, two tanks are locked in an arena where only one will survive. The challenge is to program the tank which will exit victorious. The finalists will present their completed A.I. designs to the EA judging panel and the winning entries will be chosen based on technical ability, originality and creative merit.

John Buchanan, University Research Liaison Dude at EA commented: "Over the next five to 10 years, A.I. is going to differentiate great games from the rest. With this competition, we hope to find people with a passion for A.I and understanding of the magic that makes a game truly fun to play." The by-invitation-only competition is open to the following schools: Carnegie Mellon University, Florida Technical Institute, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Southern California, Michigan State University and Stanford University.

EA is accepting entries from US citizens and residents who are currently enrolled in a recognized Computer Science program at the designated universities. Submissions will be accepted from January 15, 2006 – January 31, 2006, and prize winners will be revealed on March 15, 2006 - full rules are available via an official information form.

Posted by Jenova at 1:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

Inspiring animation and wonderful CG

Great use of HDRI technology.
http://www.1st-ave-machine.com/
Go to check the first animatino under their project page.

Posted by Jenova at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

What is this?

I shot this on my way home today around 19:30pm. The sky is completely dark, but this weird stroke on the sky is glowing as if there's light shooting through but yet it shows a smooth gradient from blue to red. I and people from my apartment gathered outside and observed it for about 30min till it fades out.

What is it?

Posted by Jenova at 7:45 PM | Comments (4)

August 10, 2005

Google Earth realized my dream

Now you can enjoy the wonder from human technology and feel the freedom to travel and learn from this software.
Download Google Earth Now!!!

Posted by Jenova at 12:02 PM | Comments (2)

July 31, 2005

Notes from Siggraph 2005 Los Angeles

Day 1, Sunday 07/31/2005

This is the official first day of the Siggraph. I am totally overwhelmed by the infromation around me. I went to sit through "An Interactive Introduction to OpenGL Programming". It was a pretty covered course about OPENGL architecture and where shader is used. The presenter Ed Angel, Dave Shreiner and Vicki Shreiner are planning adding more shader related cources for next years Siggraph.

After that I went to check out the books for sale there. I bought "Shaders for game programmers and artists" and "d'artiste: Character Modeling"

Emergent Technology
There are countless new and cool technologies in this years E-tech, I'll list a few that I feel really mind blowing piece here:

1)Fog Screen - Imagine a mass crowd of people being able to walk through a screen and see different things from both directions. The fog generated by this machine is really thin, you can't even feel the moisture from it. They demostrated a game that people can play from both sides of the screen. I'm amazed the brightness and color on the fog looks still pretty saturated.

2)Shaking the World - Glanceed at the name, the first image that came in my mind was a vibrated floor. However, suprisingly it is an earphone like device that generates electronic stimulation to create illusion like gravity and losing balance. It's pretty unbelievable to me until I tried. They use galvanic vestibular stimulation(GVS)to induce vection (virtual sense of acceleration) synchronized with optic flow or musical rhythms. They can actually control your moving direction with a remote controller hooked to the device. Regardless of the side effect of over using this device, it may become one of the new dimension in the simulation and gaming industry.

3)Touch Light - Remember Minority Report's gesture interface? Here's a similar one. Instead of controlling it by gloves, you just need to put your hands a little bit close to the screen. The trick they use is to caliborate and match the projector output to the video input so that it looks like a mirror. The cool stuff you can do with this interface is to use two hands to browse pictures and files. It feels just like how you deal with real pictures on the paper. Since it's video input, you can also do Zerox on it by putting them on the screen. The organic control from your hands is something I never experienced from keyboard and mouse.

4)X'talVisor:Full open type head-mounted projector Compared with the huge half transparent glass on a traditional head mounted projector, this one is an amazing little needle. You can't even see it when it's placed in front of your pupils. It uses spherical mirror to bounce the projector light to the objects in front of you. And you are the only one who can actually see it in full quality. Augmanted Reality may not only happen on your HMDs but also on the actual 3D world if you have one of these HMPs.

5)Seelinder - A cylindric LED matrix that display 3D videos in the middle. It is similar to holographics, but is kind of a different way to solve the same problem. Compared with holographics, this one is more believable if it appeared in the movie or games.

6)Tenori-on - Amazing and beautiful digital instrument. It uses the drum machine like digital multi-channel composing and an intuitive touch interface to create elegant eletronic music. It also support collaboration mode for multi-Tenori-ons

Then I spent my afternoon session at Ken Perlin's cource: "Web as a 3D procedual sketchbook". I was expecting him to talk about prototypeing in 3D environtment. But he spent all the time talking about his works and projects. Surprisingly, most of his later work are actually used by game like half-life 2. He's also into casual games. Definitly an interesting figure in the industry. I believe he will have more collide with games in the future. A lot of the procedual character and animation stuff he showed are very inspiring. Reminds me of "Spore"...

After that I went to the Paper Fast Forward. Man, so much great stuff! I can't summarize them since it's already been compressed into two hours. I'll give more detail about these amazing achievements later. Most of them will change the way we think and live forever...just a bit kidding.

============================================================
Day 2, Monday 08/01/2005
Keynotes & Awards
The Siggraph 2005 awards went to three distinguished professors from US and Japan. Their achievements barely made me go back to the computer science and do hardcore researches.

Geodge Locus's Keynote is a bit disappointing. He didn't even give a long enough speak. It turns to be a very casual interview later. People start leaving during the interview. I heard people mumble F word about storytelling. On one hand I can understand those people's reaction due to the sensitive words Geodge Lucas used refering CG researchers during the interview. But I also felt sympathetic towards Lucas. Storytellers and experience weavers are very important. But many of the people on Siggraph don't care.

Electronic Theater 2005
Electronic Theater and Computer Animation Festival is literarily the Oscar for independent digital artists and animators. Although this year's works are not as exiting as last year, there are still couple things worth notice. Blur Studio's "In The Rough" & "Gopher Broke" are out of expectation. The quality of their animations is close to main stream animation studios. Korean animations are also very outstanding this year, though they didn't win any awards, their works presents styled and high quality graphics together with very touching stories.

Here are the winners:

Best Animation

"9" - Is an animation very similar to the famous Siggraph 2001 winner "F8". From its moody atmosphere to the surreal world, even the ideas to deliver, "9" and "F8" are very close. But peronally I think "F8" is better overall. Why? you need to watch both.

Jury's Awards

Fallen Art - is made by the creater of "Cathedral", winner of Siggraph 2002, my favorite Siggraph animation so far. Fallen Art is also my favorite animation this year. Although half of the people like it and another half hate it, it is definitely the best looking one. With Awesome character design, high quality texture painting and composition, Fallen Art tells the story of a tragic general uses the death of his soldiers to make an stopmotion film.

La Migration Bigoudenn - A very short film. Beatifully made. A very crazy concept, really made people laugh. It's availble for download.

Overall, this year's animations are lack of stories and emotional content. "9" is the most moving animation, but still not as powerful as the ones in the past.

============================================================
Day 3, Tuesday 08/02/2005
Birds of Feather: Next Gen Game Development
Veterans from EA, Naughty Dog, Redstorm Studio gathered at Siggraph and shared the vision about next gen. Cinematic director Richard Tayler was there two. It's interesting to see all the studios have already realized the importance of rapid prototyping and out sourcing. As the budgets of next gen games rise, game studios would like to take less risks. As a result, more and more licensing games and sequels gonna appear on the shelves. It will become even more difficult for the independent game developer to work on next gen. Hopefully we will see more independent games appear on PC, which is a proven dying market.

============================================================
Day 4, Wednesday 08/03/2005

Processing.org
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.

The creators of processing gave us a 30min demostration of how simple and powerful this language is. I have used processing since last year. It is the most amazing tools I found recently. I did a lot of prototyping with processing. The effeciency of it is so high that it only takes me two days to make a complete game prototype. If you are a designer or an artist who wants to learn programing, it is definitly the best and easiest start point.

Soda Play and Moovl
If you haven't played Soda Constructor, people may think you are from Mars. It is a internet construction toy which enables you to make various creatures by creating springs. Moovl is created by the people who made soda. They wanted to make a construction toy easier to use by making it more like doodling. In Moovl, you can draw components and use spring to hook them together. It supports animation, storyboard and triggers. Everyone can feel the fun just by watching people using it. It is very inspiring for interface design and managing user created content.

Met the artist of "Fallen Art"
Portland animation director, Tomek Baginski, the creator of "Fallen Art" and "Cathedral" gave us a presentation about the making of "Fallen Art". Most of the techniques he used in this beatiful rendered movie are 2D based composition. He painted most lighting instead of render them in 3D. This project is done by a group of artists. Only Baginski himself is full timed on it. Most of the artists did it in their own time. Interestingly, when people asked about the ideas he wanted to deliver behind the scene, he said "nothing". He thought artist never know what is he actually creating until its done, he just want to make them, one after another. For some degree, I think its the same for game making. All the criticism is made based on the audience, as creators, you may not see the same stone as others.

Augmented and Virtual Reality
Enhanced Eyes for Better Gaze Awareness in Mixed Reality from University of Tsukuba - It is a research about how to improve human's sensitiviy to virtual characters. I think it is really useful to help us build better 3D character interactions in games and other medias. Presenter Keisuke Tateno mentioned three methods they used to enhance eye gazing:
1)Add highlight in the eyes to indicate direct eye contact
2)Exaggerate the muscle deformation around eyes to enhance the observation of eye movement
3)Exaggerate eye rotation to adjust the systematic error human naturely made on over estimating the direction other human's looking at

Posted by Jenova at 9:19 PM | Comments (1)

November 5, 2004

So are these numbers true?

An interesting chart between IQ and Elections.

http://attenuation.net/files/iq.htm

Posted by Jenova at 2:03 PM | Comments (2)

October 8, 2004

Cool Animation, political content?

http://www.analoglove.com/DJ_Chris_Grant/what_barry_says.mov

Some friend show me this animtaion today. I really like the motion and the tense of it. I've seen so many anti-Bush stuff on the web, this is just one of them that is well done.

Posted by Jenova at 11:24 AM | Comments (1)

September 15, 2004

Ghost in the Shell 2 finally comes!

This friday night.

Offical Website: http://www.gofishpictures.com/GITS2/main.html

Los Angeles Pacific ArcLight West Hollywood 17-Sep
Los Angeles Landmark Westside Pavillion Los Angeles 17-Sep
Los Angeles Landmark NuWilshire Santa Monica 17-Sep
Los Angeles Pacific Galleria 15 Sherman Oaks 17-Sep
Los Angeles Landmark Rialto Pasadena 17-Sep
Los Angeles Regal Stadium 6 Long Beach 17-Sep
Los Angeles Regal University Town Center Irvine 17-Sep
Los Angeles Pacific Manhattan Beach Village 6 Manhattan Beach 17-Sep
Los Angeles Regal Brea Stadium 22 Brea 17-Sep
Los Angeles Regal The Avenues Peninsula 17-Sep

Posted by Jenova at 11:26 PM | Comments (1)

Interactive Media Mania from EA party

See how we play with "IM":

Posted by Jenova at 12:34 AM | Comments (2)

November 11, 2003

Matrix Revolutions at LA SIGGRAPH

The Los Angeles SIGGRAPH Chapter is hosting a Matrix Revolutions event on 20 November, sponsored by Alias. The event will be at the Digital Cinema Lab in Hollywood and features VFX and CG supervisors from ESC, GKR, Tippett and Imageworks.

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=102012

Posted by Jenova at 2:36 PM | Comments (0)