VR Hype and the California Gold Rush... Anything Substantive There? (and a little gushing about Medium.com)

Uhm, Medium.com is totally amazing. Slick, smart, and oh so purdy.. Here's my profile on it. Anyhow, here's a quick bit I wrote on it:

VR and the California Gold Rush: Balancing Hype with Substance

I had wanted to write this a while ago... and feel a little late on publishing it, as VR is pretty much already here, but the hype definitely still exists.

In any case, read up and comment over there if you want. Moving forward, I'm going to have to figure out where my written online content belongs... here or there...

Lumarca for Processing -- 1.0.0 published!

I just released "Lumarca for Processing" -- an easy way to make stuff in the Lumarca with Processing. It uses two really cool and elegant techniques that I wanted to share: distance functions for modeling geometry, and extending Processing's "Renderer" object to make the code super easy to work with.

On Modeling Geometry...

One of the questions you need to ask if you want to build a renderer for a volumetric display is, "how do I want to model geometry?"   In other words, how do I want to store the idea of a 3d sphere inside a computer?

The obvious place to start is by looking at how everybody else does it.

Conventional 3d modelers start by placing a bunch of dots on the surface of the sphere.  They then connect the dots to make edges, and the edges to make triangles.  Here's an example of what that looks like:

The point of this exercise is to obtain the triangles.  Why?  Because faces are all you see when you look at something through a 2d screen.  Your brain constructs a sense of volume from what it sees on the faces -- how light hits them and how textures deform around them. In other words, to create the illusion of 3d on a 2d display, make a bunch of triangles (2d shapes) and arrange them in a way that makes them appear 3d.

Unfortunately, this methodology doesn't translate well to 3d volumetric displays.

Using 2d display practices to build stuff for Lumarca feels like using paint brushes to shape clay.  In 3d volumetric displays, 2d shapes are boundaries.  This is similar to how lines are boundaries on 2d displays.  A square on a 2d display is bounded by 4 lines.  A cube in a 3d volumetric display is bounded by 6 squares.  For the Lumarca, I don't want face data.  I need volume data.

How we did it in the past

So for my first pass, I decided to ignore 2d rendering techniques altogether, and build a renderer from scratch. I used a bunch of high-school trig to solve for both a sphere and a cube. It was a weird and manual solution, but it worked. I liked how spheres weren't just polygon approximations, but mathematically truly spheres.  With all the trig, though, it took quite a bit of time to render when you wanted multiple shapes on the screen at once.

The second pass at modeling geometry was inside a library built by my colleague Matt Parker.  The library was a huge improvement on the "software" that existed... which was more a collection of functions than software.  This pass at modeling used OpenGL, and we ran into all those problems I ran away from in the first place -- how do you know where "inside" of an object is when all you have is triangle data.  There were lots of clever work arounds, but there were always a few edge case bugs that we would just have to code around instead of fix.

After a few amazing events / installations Matt and I slowly lost interest over the years and stopped making progress on the software. Eventually Processing would release version 2.0, and the Lumarca Software became outdated.

Distance Functions

Sometime this last year I saw a video on ray marching that just knocked my socks off. I won't go into a full explanation of how ray marching works in this post (maybe later), but if you'd like to know more about it, I'd definitely encourage that you watch the demo.

Ray marching introduced me to the idea of a distance function -- which is an algorithm that tells you if a point is inside or outside an object, and by how much. So, say you had a sphere centered at (0, 0, 0) with a radius of 1 unit.  Using a distance function, you'd find:

(2, 0, 0) would return 1, meaning that this point is 1 unit from the outside of the sphere (0, 0, 1) would return 0, meaning that this point is exactly on the surface of the sphere (0, .5, .4) would return -.36, meaning is .36 units inside the sphere

The code of those specific algorithms for the curious.

Distance functions are totally amazing. They are compact, crazy fast, and can run parallelized over the graphics card instead of the CPU. Also, they have a mathematical purity that polygon meshes don't share.  Additionally, unlike geometry defined with triangles, distance functions will also tell you important things like proximity / inclusion.

Distance Functions in this Library

This last point is super-important for the Lumarca.  One small piece of code tells you if something is inside or outside a shape.  Here's how this is implemented in the Lumarca for Processing library.

When the library is run, it generates a "map" image that looks like this:

A map image is a concise way to define the physical geometry of a Lumarca structure. When a calibrated projector projects this image out onto the structure of strings, the color of each pixel describes where it lands. The RGB values describe the pixel's XYZ location. In other words, a pixel that has an RGB pigment of (255, 0, 0), when projected, will hit a string at (x max, y min, z min).  Now all I need to do is this XYZ location into a distance function, which will tell whether or not you're inside a geometry and by how much.

What's nice about this approach is that you compute all the expensive geometry only one time -- at the generation of the map image. Everything after that is simply reading from this texture and performing simple distance functions, making it run way faster.

More significant than the speed, though, was that distance functions helped me break through a problem that was holding me and the Lumarca project back for years. I didn't need to do crazy trig or to rely on a batch of triangles and intersection calculations. I had found something that was designed to give me answers in a volumetric manner, and so I stitched the distance function into the core of the library.

So how nicely does this all play with Processing?

Now that I had a plan for creating geometry, I just needed to wrap it all up in a Processing library that was easy to use.

To give some context, in past iterations, writing the code to pass a sphere was quite painful.  If you wanted to build a sphere from the initial software, you needed to copy and paste around 100 lines of code.  If you wanted to build a sphere from the 0.1.1 library, it was orders of magnitude simpler, but still quite complicated:

shape = new ObjFile(this, center, new PVector(1, 0, 0), "sphere.obj", 1.5);
lumarca.drawShape(new PVector(1, 1, 0), shape);

I wanted to cut this down and make it easy.  How easy?  I wanted it to be as easy as the rest of Processing.  I wanted to create a sphere by simply calling "sphere(10)".

I dug around to see how realistic it would be to overwrite / replace elementary Processing functions, things like sphere() and box(). When I looked, I found that while these could be replaced, it would mean replacing the entire renderer, and potentially doing some really really ugly things. I'd also have to do it with one of my least favorite languages: Java. Cue eyeroll. But I really wanted this so I decided to investigate a bit and just survey how painful this would get.

I was dead wrong

While I'm still not a fan of Java : ) I can absolutely see the appeal where I did not before.

While I was technically correct that I'd have to replace the entire renderer, I hadn't realized that making new renderers was really simple.  Processing has, by design, swappable renderers and simple ways to build your own renderers.  The heavy-handed OOP nature of Java helped me swim through this process and gave me all the guide rails I needed.

The library includes Lumarca.RENDERER.  You enable it simply by passing it into the Processing size() function -- so something like: size(1024, 768, Lumarca.RENDERER).  You can easily flip back to size(1024, 768, P3D) if you want to see your work in a conventional 3d context if you happen to be not near a display anymore.

What's really cool about this neat little trick is that sphere(10) means the same thing in the Lumarca.RENDERER as it does in the P3D renderer, just with a different graphical result.  It means you can take hopefully any conventional processing sketch and display it on the Lumarca with a few configuration differences.

Lumarca spotted in Europe

About five months ago I was contacted by a group of artists out in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. They were interested in building a version of the Lumarca for an event called Heliodesign.

They did that. They've also gone on to build bigger and better designs, and did something that I hadn't ever tried before -- projection on string outdoors. Here's a video from another festival, Staro Riga:

https://vimeo.com/112679446

Super cool! For more information about the organization that did this, Valgusklubi, check out their Facebook page.

Bleepify it!

About two years ago I built a prototype for a web page that would convert any website into music.  As a prototype, it was very ugly and only worked in a few browsers.  I got busy and forgot about it... Then just a few weeks back I uncovered it.  To my surprise, I found that most modern browsers now support the technology.  So I gave it a face lift and, well, here we are:

My favorites pages to try it on are Youtube and Reddit... I guess I like structure...

I also enjoy how the control bar will convert itself to music as well...  Serves as a nice coda to button everything up.

Anyhow, enjoy all the bleeping-blooping!

Progress as a Liquid Dancer

So I've been doing a lot of liquid dancing lately. Apart from going to a few raucous parties now and again, I've been trying to contribute back to the scene that has given me so much. I have been developing a tutorial series on the fundamentals of liquid:

I get some really amazing warm feedback from posting these from people who are intensely interested in the same stuff that I am. It also helps me strengthen my technique when I force myself to ponder these typically non-linguistic ideas and articulate them for others.

Also, I've assisted a friend with a project and co-authred his paper on liquid dance and HCI:

• Project Page (the design of my site, btw, is totally based on the design of his)
• Link to the paper itself

It all started when Diego contacted me about questions about the Lumarca project. We got to talking and hit it off and I learned that he was really into Laban Movement Analysis, which is a very cool way of trying to capture and describe movement from an academic perspective.

Anyhow, we hit it off very quickly and I kept trying to force down his throat this idea that I had, which was that whenever the true 3d interfaces of tomorrow make it to our living rooms, the people who study liquid will be the power users. Further, that anybody building designs for 3d interaction should be looking at this community, because the fundamental principles that drive this form of dance are perfect principles for designing elegant, efficient, beautiful, and natural 3d interfaces.

Anyhow, one thing led to another, and now this counts as the second masters thesis I've inspired! : D (The first being Matt Parker's on the Lumarca at ITP).

So yeah, just wanted to share all of that. HCI people, meet liquid people. Liquid people, meet HCI people. I have a feeling y'all will be a match made in heaven someday...

Me + Internet = It's Complicated

I took a little over a year to rethink my relationship to the internet as an artist. It's given me some amazing emotional rushes. It has also contributed to some rough times. Here's what I've discovered about me, my work, and the internet.

Being "Right"

Before I get into "me + something else", I want to first review who I was when I started this new media art journey.

Just outa college, I was motivated by one thing: being right. It wasn't money, power, social good, raising awareness, or anything like that; for better or for worse, I was mostly only motivated by "rightness".

To me, being right meant designing things the right way. In terms of process, it meant that I wanted to itch away at a riddle until I unraveled it's definitive mechanic. Once I was confident that I'd cut away all the fat and left nothing but the core solution, I used that answer as a foundation to construct the logical hyperbole of that idea. This was a tedious process -- as most creative processes are.

To assist in this tedium, I needed some tools. I needed a way to record my journey. I needed a place to workshop my thoughts. I needed a stage to exhibit my finished work.

The internet was my toolbox

The internet fit all these needs. It was my diary, my community, and my gallery. I could vent my frustrations and record my insights. I could contemplate my progress, share my ideas, get feedback, and present to the world.

It was a good toolbox to have... I felt well-equipped to test wildly outlandish ideas because I always had a trail of breadcrumbs if I needed to get back home. So what if my conclusions ended up being wrong? I had a paper trail, knew what I wanted, and had a pretty good sense of where I was coming from.

Then the Traffic Came...

The first time I was temporarily "internet famous," it was an absolute thrill ride. I was bouncing up and down and felt like a champ.

It was this weird sense of ironic glee; I knew sites like Reddit and Digg were just ridiculous popularity contests, but at the same time, like, dude, I mean... the top post of Reddit!

Looking back now I can see where I misstepped. While I was able to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation, I was not prepared to process it. There's this term that people use to describe websites that get suddenly popular and get swamped by traffic: "slashdotted". Slashdotted sites usually get taken down as soon as they become popular. My web content wasn't ever slashdotted... but I was.

What I mean to say is, my work withstood all the traffic just fine, but my psychology couldn't properly process all this newfound attention.

Internet Attention: AKA Hype

The thing about internet attention -- especially internet attention focused on potential future technologies -- is that it's almost entirely hype without any substance.

What I mean is, popular internet attention is the type of ruckus that emits from a crowd of people who are doing nothing but waiting to be excited. Hype is collective blind optimism.

And when I shared my work with the internet, on a few occasions it struck a chord with these people. Not so much because it was a practical solution to anything, but because it was absolutely "right" by it's own internal design.

I fell in love with the attention. I figured that the only way for me to grow was to lean into it. Instead of being an expert at my domain knowledge, I wanted to be an expert for the sake of this hyped up community.

Being "Right" on other people's terms

As you may imagine, this was a painfully terrible instinct to follow. While before any of this happened, I was mostly concerned with using "be right" as a motto to develop rock-solid designs, now I was trying to apply "be right" to other people's speculations about my work.

The problem here was that I didn't truly grok other people's issues like I grokked mine. The riddles I unraveled in the comfort of my own home were mine. They were elegant riddles that rendered elegant answers.

The riddles that the sea of internet gave me felt fuzzy and impossibly large. They involved politics, the future, and real-world costs. Instead of providing elegant answers to personal, elegant riddles, I was trying to provide simple designs for really big fuzzy questions.

Give up on solving other people's problems

Eventually I got so frustrated and felt so confused that I gave up on other people's problems. After all, I wasn't an expert on the things they were bringing up. I was an expert on answering my own questions.

This revelation was liberating in the sense that I wasn't beholden to anybody else.

But, on the other hand, it was confounding for a new reason.

If I wasn't interested in seeing these designs through to completion -- if I built these projects merely as design exercises -- did any of it matter? In other words, if my creative work has no obligation other than to just be beautiful, am I actually adding any substantive value? Or was I just stoking the fires of internet hype by feeding it what it wanted?

To be clear, I stand by the work. It is good, and it's designed with a very deliberate, methodological approach. It was intended to be beautiful, and I think it accomplished that. But if I'm only adding to the hype, is it still worth doing? Does it, in the end, make the world a better place, or just a more cacophonous one?

So I took a break...

This whole journey made me sick and made me want to walk away from it all. I could feel myself wanting to publish things on the internet, but I could also feel that it became something ugly. Every new idea I started playing with felt like it was contaminated by this soupy confusion of stupid considerations like "I wonder if this would make a good post on Reddit" or "I wonder what sort of blogs would pick this up".

So I decided to stop and to abandon my desire to publish work altogether. At first it was just an emotional knee-jerk reaction, but by the time I realized what was happening, I thought it was kinda neat that my defense mechanism did that, and I rolled with the punch.

And I think I was right. After a while I felt healthier and better grounded. I felt like I got a better sense of what I wanted from the internet, and a more discerning eye when it came parsing the good from the bad.

And so now I'm back...

What I realized with my time away is that there's a "Right Way" to engage with the internet as a new media artist.

The "Right Way" is to acknowledge that the internet is an indispensable collection of tools -- at least for my personal creative process. It is a public journal, a workshop space, and a personal gallery.

The "Right Way" is to build ideas that, from the get-go, are related to the greater good of some community. And no, the community that is "Internet Press" doesn't count, because that community is just a churning hype machine.

The "Right Way" is to focus on those riddles, to unravel them, to expose them, and to continue to be relentless about their purity, even after other people engage with them.

I'm very glad that I took time away from this blog. I'm also glad to be back, to have access to those tools again, and to feel like I have a better, well-rounded understanding of how these tools work.

So I don't have all the answers right now, but that's okay. After all, that's what this blog is for -- a place for me to work out my confusions. Also, for the first time in a very long time, I can happily say that I'm relieved to not feel like I should have those answers.