In preparation for the final project of my social VR class, we shared some of our dreams as inspiration for designing spaces. Here I try to recreate a spooky endless “victorian parlor” from the mind of one of my classmates!
Read MoreThis past week, I had the pleasure of hearing Wade Wallerstein, Bay-Area-based Digital Anthropologist and Founder/Director of Silicon Valet, speak at one of my classes. To be honest, I had no concept of what digital anthropology was, and a quick hour-long deep dive into some extremely dense theory and a rapid-fire overview of important observations eventually coalesced into a few important takeaways:
Digital interactions are Real. It is reality, experienced through a digital lens.
The collective meaning-making we do in the real world, turning “spaces” into “places”, exists just as strongly, yet entirely uniquely, in the digital domain.
Maybe the thing that hasn’t quite sat right with me about all these Zoom calls over the last year is nestled alongside this claim: The potential for “reality” in digital interactions, when homogenized and sterilzed, only then becomes a poor attempt at human communication.
Touching back on Digital Anthropology, for a moment, I want to tease at some of the ways in which I’ve started to reconsider how I/we all engage online. There are a whole bunch of terms and concepts that have been coined over the last 30 years, and it’s a bit of a highlight reel of things to consider: How does the literal physical interface of the computer affect our interaction? How do we engage with our bodies’ “algorithms” (say, touching your hair when you get nervous) in a mediated space? Can a digital experience, by virtue of being played through some unique combination of hardware, software, and environment, ever be truly the same? Has the seamlessness fluidity of modern social media platforms totally squashed away any sense of “community”?
As a slight counter to the fatalist “all community is dead”, it does show up in various ways: Reddit, fandoms, discord, twitch communities - all somewhat-personalized ways for folks to gather and experience. If that sounds interesting, here’s a bit of a deep dive into one particular corner: Musicologist George Reid speaking brilliantly on some of the ways in which “fandom”, nostalgia, and music overlap in the identity-and-community-making of the chiptune music scene in this interview
While these are all good questions - what’s the tie-in? At least for me, this seems to fit naturally into the work I’m doing for my thesis at NYU. Digital communication is currently stunted, impersonal, and simply difficult to navigate. I’ve sat for dozens of zoom meetings, and yet Zoom doesn’t feel like a “Place”. It’s the same window into the same emotionless, awkward-conversation-prone consumption of sound, only for people I’d otherwise be forging lifelong bonds with (and myself) to hit the “Log Out” button exactly at the top of the hour. So what’s the remedy?
This room easily defined my first few years of undergrad. Image from.. 2014?
I don’t have a perfect answer, but maybe a potential attempt. I recently met (via Zoom) with some fellow alumni from my music fraternity back at Michigan, Phi Mu Alpha. We used to run a student cafe during my first few years, but it got axed during a building renovation before we graduated. As we were chatting, it hit me: That is place. It’s almost perfect: the literal space doesn’t even exist anymore, yet, as we all sat there reminiscing on zoom, memories of “The Lounge” brought us right back into a sense of togetherness that felt like it had been gone for nearly 6 years. I realized “what if the missing ingredient is Place”?
So, using my newfound skills in Blender, I set to work. There’s still much to be done, but maybe a virtual hang in a spot so filled with memory will be the extra “oomph” we’ve been missing lately. In a world of sterilized, one-size-fits-all communications and social media platforms, what we’re missing is what the early internet had in spades: AIM away messages. Myspace pages. Some little corner of the internet where people got to be themselves, and in doing so, carved out a genuine place in that vast ocean of bits.
It’s certainly a start.
Also texturing is a thing! Wow it’s hard.
I’m going to keep this one short and sweet! After doing some awesome tutorials courtesy of The Blender Guru , I’ve finally given 3D modeling a real shot! The tutorials were an awesome overview of the tool, and provided a great first step in.
The proof is in the pudding! … well, icing.
Andrew Price, who runs the YT channel, approached it from the “80/20” perspective: 80% of the time, you’ll only need 20% of the tools in a given software. So, true to form, in a few short hours of listening to his instructions I have made my first render - this little doughnut!
Afterwards, I thought a great next step (and litmus test of whether I actually learned anything) would be to try and create something “from scratch” (at least, in the 3D domain without tutorials.)
A few hours later, I’m pretty proud of the results for the third-ish object I’ve ever made in this software.
Overwatch’s “Pachimari” character, this version affectionately named “Piggymari”
One last bit - in the process of looking up which “Pachimari” to do. (I knew that simple smooth textures were going to be way easier than say, the mummy one), I stumbled upon a new vocabulary word / concept: Yuru-Chara.
Long story short, that’s the Japanese term for the cute little brand mascots which are made to be approachable and relaxing. I rather like the idea, we could all use a little more cute!
For my “Social VR” course at NYU, this week we were required to design a simple environment using Mozilla’s web-based 3D scene builder. Overall, it think it’s a pretty handy tool for how much accessibility it affords, and the integration with various asset sources makes it fairly simple to pick up!
When thinking of an environment to get started on, as a big fan of Tabletop RPG’s the now-trite beginning of many a years of play has usually begun with some variation on “So all of your characters meet in this Tavern…”, and I thought, why not start this ‘Adventure’ in one! To avoid burying the lede, here’s a snippet of what I was able to dream up:
You can practically hear the farmer who’s having a Giant Rat problem already…
The fun part of this, however, isn’t in the finished product but rather in what would be my first foray into learning Blender, and grabbing assets from SketchFab that weren’t quite right. Firstly, I need to properly credit the artist François Espagnet for his wonderfully stylish assets.
However, when I first went to import those nice windowed-wall sections, there seemed to be a glaring error in the context of my cozy nighttime scene:
Something doesn’t exactly scream “nighttime” here
So I figured “This is a great time to learn about how to change materials in a 3d modelling software. Or maybe it’s textures. I don’t quite know the name yet.” and opened up the asset to try and figure out what I was doing.
After some great “How to make glass materials in Blender” tutorials (so it was materials), my object looked great in the Render Preview screen, wait, viewport, I exported it and dragged it into Spoke, only to find my beautifully transparent windows now part of a colorless gray slab. And after a few hours, I was able to figure it out, with beautiful transparency. Mission Accomplished.
A little Dark, but voila! It works!
As for the Technical How, let’s talk details for those interested.
So in order make exporting / rendering / uploading one smooth process, one of the increasingly-adapted formats is that of the GL Transmission Format (glTF) and it’s binary partner, (GLB). Developed by The Khronos Group, the encode all of the relevant object info in a neat little .JSON package, capable of storing textures, geometry, animation and more, which is incredible.
That being said, the Blender-Render(er) isn’t entirely perfect and hasn’t caught up entirely to the featureset that Blender itself provides. While most of the aforementioned tutorials recommended using a Principled BSDF shader node and tweaking the Transmission all the way up and tweaking other stuff to taste, the current Blender Exporter breaks with certain parameters, one being 'Specularity’. After considerable time, ~40 export attempts, and some forum digging, I found the way to get some sloppy transparency working. Instructions as follows:
It’s not quite as beautiful as a great '‘glass’ material, but it gets the job done and let’s light through! There you have it. I’m looking forward to learning how to do it all properly, but for now I’m glad I got it done