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Blog - June, 2010

Resident home (day 289)

Maria Lantin

The last day of the residency was June 9th. We toured the NFB StereoLab in the morning. They have a great setup with many passive polarized projection systems matched with SANDDE 3D drawing stations. That week they also happened to be testing out the Panasonic twin lens 3D camera. The Director of Photography didn't give it great marks mostly because of bad compression artifacts and poor performance in low light. When I saw the footage I didn't think it was that bad. They were just starting to work with it and it was a pre-production model so it is quite possible their opinion will change. But for $22,000 the expectations are high.

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The pajama test: An open letter to my Facebook “friends”

Alexandra Samuel

You may have noticed that you’re hearing from me less, and when you do, it’s mostly about my husband or my shoes or how I feel when someone eats the last brownie. Maybe you’re happy that your news feed isn’t full of my Twitter updates anymore (I got rid of my Twitter-to-Facebook hookup) or maybe you’re unhappy that I never write on your wall. Maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t accept your friend request, or maybe you’re wondering why you’re not in my friend list when you used to be.

Here’s the truth: we’re not actually friends. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, or think you’re smart, or want to work with you. I’ve turned down friend requests from some of my favourite colleagues, and from people I respect a lot. In fact I would love to hear from you on Twitter (I’m @awsamuel), and if you’re missing all those great social media links and tidbits, you’ll still find them on my Twitter feed.

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Social networks say good-bye to difficult but crucial interactions

Alexandra Samuel

Todd Essig has a thoughtful post about how social networks have affected the process of saying good-bye in our culture. Now that the hospital where he works is closing, he anticipated more than the usual end-of-school-year good-byes. Instead, he’s seen less: as one of his residents observed, “there has been more ’see you on Facebook!’ and ‘I’ll follow you on Twitter‘” than actual goodbyes.

While social networks promise to help us keep in touch, that same promise may deprive us of a meaningful good-bye, Essig writes:

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A few good lungs (day 279)

Maria Lantin

More recording in the studio. It was a slow start with a discovery that all our previous recordings had been somehow faulty. They didn't sound bad or anything, just inaccurate in the sound-field aspects. A couple of hours later the problem had been located and we were able to record. We had a list of sounds to individually record:

  • words and phrases of uncertainty
  • yawning
  • dialogue and gossip pronouns (I, you, we, us, together, they, them)
  • throat clearing
  • breathing
  • humming

It took about a half hour to record per individual. We then recorded group sounds like footwork on the wooden floor, skin rubbing, and Tibetan chimes and singing bowl performance. We finished the day at a Portuguese Grill. Yum.

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Failure, Success, Failure... (day 276)

Maria Lantin

My goal for today was to get a few pairs of lungs breathing independently, or at least visually distinct from each other. Getting instancing working in Touch took me a little while but it worked and in the end I had a little group of identical lungs breathing. But the animation on the lungs looked wrong because the instancing broke the pivot point of the objects. So my little success turned into a pretty big failure as I tried to alter the pivot on an instance basis, to no avail. I finally decided to write to the Derivative forum. Lo, I heard almost right away from one of their developers who said it's a bug. He'll be releasing a workaround in a day or two. I was almost relieved to hear that my defeat was not solely from rust. The workaround involves writing a shader to rectify the order of transformations. Since I had to write a shader for the lungs anyway, it's not such a hardship. Rather more like a prod.

Tomorrow we spend the majority of the day in the recording/listening studio. It is the last day in the studio so hopefully we will record everything we'll be needing later on.

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Welcome to the SIM Centre

The Social + Interactive Media Centre is a new research centre that supports a wide range of applied social, interactive and design projects. Funded by a 5-year grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the centre offers BC companies a way to tap the design, creative and technical expertise of Emily Carr faculty and students.