SIM Centre | Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University

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Resident home (day 289)

by 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.
In the afternoon, Valerie Walker of Studio XX interviewed Leila and I for her radio show. She is a skilled interviewer and it was great to talk with her about the project. The interview will air shortly. I'll post a link as soon as it does.

A few good lungs (day 279)

by Maria Lantin

June 2 (day 6)
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 soundfield 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.

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

by 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.

Inaugural spin (day 256)

by Maria Lantin

The tech session with the stereoscopic rig went really well. About 15 people came and for over two hours Marty talked about the technical aspects of the rig and took questions from the participants. There was lots of great feedback and many said they would be interested in coming back and spending some time experimenting with the rig. We ourselves will be spending some quality time with the rig in the coming days getting ready for the Western Economic Diversification announcement of the S3D Centre taking place at Emily Carr on May 20th. We'll be filming the event with the rig and showing the live footage on a 3DTV LCD (Hyundai S465D).

I taped a lot of the session today but I haven't had time to upload the footage. In the meantime here is a photo taken from an iPhone of Marty and I looking at the live stream for the first time. The next shot is an older one of my first time seeing the rig at Kerner in late March.

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

by Alexandra Samuel

Dear Facebook “friend”,

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.

Social networks say good-bye to difficult but crucial interactions

by 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:

The promise of compromise (day 189)

by Maria Lantin

The search for a portable S3D continued yesterday and today. Some incredibly useful people helped narrow down the search including Michael Verity, Vic Love, and Chris Lakes. There is no perfect solution out there but in the interest of time and future intrepid field stereographers of the S3D Centre, I had to make a decision.