.mwj

Worms music video by Sil Van Der Woerd

mwj — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 22:30:23 +0000

Microprofessions

mwj — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:06:29 +0000

Double Happiness is seeking Second Lifers to work in our telematic textile factory on Eyebeam Island from January 17-27 for 3-hour shifts. We offer a competitive salary of 200 Lindens per hour plus land bonuses. No experience necessary. Positions include laser cutters, dye vat operators, jaquard loom weavers, quality control and supervisors.
— from Double Happiness Manufacturing

Nodes and Web 3.0

mwj — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:24:12 +0000

Last week at the Masters of Digital Media we were paid a visit by the creators of Houdini, a high end 3d animation suite. I haven’t used much in the way of 3d tools (like Maya, 3D Studio Max or Blender), but I am getting more interested in the subject. This is mostly because I believe that Web 3.0 will consist of traversable 3d space, like the Metaverse from Snow Crash.

Houdini is the most expensive 3d animation software out there, but the big selling point is that it allows users to solve visual problems in a procedural way. This sort of proceduralism works like so: first, you take a standard primitive object, like a basic pyramid or a sphere. Then you select an effect, say the colour red, and apply it to the sphere. After this, perhaps you take a certain bumpy texture and apply it, or a certain set of commands that morph the sphere into a different shape.

Each of these effects are called nodes, and the beauty of them is that they can be re-applied to a different shape to generate a different object. Or we can follow the advice of one of the crew from Houdini, and think of proceduralism as cooking. If we think of this style of creation as making a soup, the object that you apply everything to is like the stock or base, and each node you add is a different ingredient.

This is a video of Reactable, a musical instrument of sorts that uses proceduralism to generate very interesting sounds. Each individual sphere is acting as a node, which alters some aspect of the sound, such as its pitch or frequency, to create a wide array of sounds.

This idea of using proceduralism to generate visual and audio creations is a very powerful one, and I think we will see more of it as crowd-sourcing and user-generated content becomes more popular. As one of the Houdini guys pointed out, re-arranging nodes is a form of programming, a visual way to design complex code.

One last example of the power of proceduralism can be seen in an advertisement for Guinness, designed with Houdini. The ad, which can be found here, depicts the de-evolution of three Guinness drinkers, from their current frat boy selves back to baby reptiles in the primordial ooze. About a quarter of the way in, we see the British countryside go from fully populated to an empty green as we traverse back through thousands of years in about four seconds. The challenge here was how to recreate history, so that the population seemed to occur according to some plan.

The solution described to us by the Houdini representatives was elegant and simple. First, the creators of the ad established all of the old church sites that were formed when humans began living in the particular area used for the ad. The churches were drawn into the picture. Then, using proceduralism, the areas around these churches were populated in a semi-random way with only a few different buildings (nodes), with the properties of each varied only slightly to create a number of different looking buildings. Finally, the entire process was played in reverse, and the effect is a believable recreation of how civilization may have formed.

These techniques no doubt will be used to generate all sorts of believable landscapes, from individual blades of grass right up to buildings and mountains and rivers. But more than that, proceduralism and nodes makes powerful tools available to people who have little background in programming, by representing the coding process in a bite-sized, visual way, and take us one step closer to the 3D, user-generated web.

Added flickr to extension.mwj

mwj — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:52:31 +0000

I’ve now added a Flickr widget to the site that displays the last four photos from my Flickr photostream. The Masters of Digital Media gave us all small cameras to shoot the world with, so this is me doing my part to make sure that I’m generating lots of photos. I’m also going to be adding screenshots from the various worlds that we are using in our classes, as well as project photos and perhaps even some screenshots from our final products.

I’m in the newspaper

mwj — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:03:35 +0000

So I got a scholarship from Electronic Arts for the Masters of Digital Media that I’m taking right now, and it has generated a little bit of press. I got my BA in Langley (and spent the last 5 years there) so the story has run twice, once in the Langley Advance and once in the Langley Times. Both of those are cached here, but you can see the online version on the canada.com network.

4 changes I’d make to Second Life

mwj — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:44:24 +0000

I’ve been out of the blogosphere for far too long, so I’m just going to jump into it and not make any apologies. I’ve been spending more and more of my time on Second Life lately, at the University Project that Sun has set up for the Masters of Digital Media.

Second Life is a great big open playground, where you can build a lot of different things and add scripts that make them do a lot of different things. Anything that citizens make in Second Life belongs to them, and they can resell their items at any price using Linden dollars which can be exchanged for real money. But you know all that already.

What I’m interested is where Second Life falls short in its claim to be heralding in a new paradigm for cyberspace. In particular, there are at least four areas that need significant work before virtual worlds like Second Life can be part of Web 3.0.

Peer to Peer networking: I put this first because all the other changes I’d make require far too much computing power for a single server to handle. Put simply, the old paradigm is client-server based–everybody logs on to a central server which holds the guts of the virtual world, doling out information as it deems necessary. Peer to peer networking uses bit-torrent technology to make everyone a server. This fundamentally changes the way we think about infrastructure: whereas before more people meant more money spent on central computing power, with peer to peer more people actually means that you have more power to play with. This has been done before, for example World of Warcraft uses bit torrent to distribute their patches and the SETI program uses distributed computing to find aliens. The big issue here is trust–how do we allow only the right people to turn our extra computing power into server space?
True 3D Modeling (and physics): 3D Studio Max allows beautiful models to be built and exquisite physics to be applied to them. It does this using an insane number of polygons and lots of math. Second Life tries to lessen the load with shortcuts like treating circles as squares. The full power of 3DS Max needs to be harnessed and used in virtual worlds, but only after the computing power is there.
Object Oriented, persistent Scripting: Scripting in Second Life is frustrating because everything is linear and data storage is tentative at best. In order to allow objects to do the things that they can do in single-user environments, a fully-loaded API must be developed which gives programmers even more free reign than they had before.
Make it matter: This last one is far more philosophical than the rest, and hinges around the way in which World of Warcraft sharpens the minds of its players.
There, everyone has at least some goals in common–stay alive long enough to make money/gain xp/gain equipment or whatever else you want to do. In Second Life, there is no such unity of purpose. Of course, that is the way they built it. But aside from being able to push other avatars around, interaction between players is limited only to what can be programmed, which gives player-to-player interaction something of an arbitrary feel. I’d solve this by introducing death, or not being able to fly, or some limiting factor that makes the environment matter that much more. C.S. Lewis once wrote a book called The Great Divorce in which he expressed a very poignant view about hell. Hell, he said, is not a place where you are punished and forced into certain modes of behaviour–no, hell is a place where everyone can do whatever they want. What this amounts to, as the protagonist finds out, is an endless wasteland of mansions, castles, monuments to greatness, all built by people obsessed with themselves. Not having any need, they are pushed out further and further from each other, surrounding themselves with their own creations and drowning out their solitude with their own newest invention. My experience with Second Life has often been similar: I fly around beautiful cities, speeding past stunning buildings, vehicles and clothing, but rarely do I run into another human being. This is the dark side of user-generated content, and Web 3.0 must take this into consideration and ensure that players are tied together in ways to prevent it from becoming just another beautiful wasteland.

NYTimes on Theodicy

mwj — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:23:24 +0000

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
– NYTimes, Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

Married

mwj — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 21:02:30 +0000

I never did find my identity (see previous post), but I did get a new set of papers to convince myself I’m me. Among them: a BC driver’s license, an international student card and a marriage certificate.

The day went by in a blur, and now we’re hitched and traveling the globe. I’m sure Facebook will provide all the details about June 16, but if you want to keep up to date with our honeymoon travels, please visit our (post) wedding blog and keep on checking back as we update it with pictures and stories from around Europe.

lost

mwj — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:09:27 +0000

Yesterday I lost my wallet at a bottle depot. After canceling my money cards, I began the task of ensuring that somebody else doesn’t pretend to be Matthew W. Jenkins. This involves calling credit bureaus, contacting vital statistics, and trying to get a new driver’s license.

The experience has been particularly traumatic because I am getting married in less than 25 days and we leave for Europe right after the wedding.

Packing for an extended journey means cramming enough stuff into the smallest amount of space possible so that when you arrive at your destination and unpack you have some reminder of home. Problem is, I lost my permanent address trying to get the deposit back on some beer cans.

The good news is that my identity has become so streamlined I only need a passport and a couple of carry-ons to pretend that I’m me. This observation brings with it a certain manic exhiliration, but I wonder what happens when we touch down on the other side.

Maybe it’s what She said:

Settling is often
well
Unsettling.
I lose my name.
You feel the pressure
In the pit of your stomach.
Our ears pop.
Gravity gains
We bounce
Things jiggle
We’re propelled forward
And halt.

Kierkegaard on education

mwj — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:19:22 +0000

What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.
– Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling