"The Tributary"

I’m experimenting with an online social network game, that uses a digital currency (“tributary water”) to track value of the social network. The premise of the project came up when I wondered what would happen if your currency depreciated at a rapid pace.

Eventually I landed on this idea where 10% of your wallet of this currency would be forced to be directed to other players twice a day. This forced spending would hopefully force people to participate in defining value in the network.

After all, what is value in a social media platform? I tend to demonize advertising as systems driven off of ads incentivize weird behavior — where engagement is the only thing that counts. People trying to game the system of making money off of engagement is why we have click-bait, the re-emergence of mainstream conspiracy discussions (like anti-vax, pizza-gate, etc…), and amplification of enraging content. These things make lots of money in ad-based networks because they command attention! So I want to try something else.

In this alternate network, participants are FORCED to declare value in the actions of others, as they are always paying back into the network as a function of the network.

I don’t know if this is going to work, but it’s fun trying at least.

Anyhow, here are the Game Instructions If you want to participate, please hit me up.

Development Notes

I’m hosting the game on Slack and made a bot using https://stdlib.com/ — which I’m mostly pretty happy with.

Made a bunch of in-progress videos for this game. I really don’t expect people to watch them, but recording and posting them was helpful in my process. Here are those progress videos.

Lego and VR Games (Beat Saber, Catch the Beat) as Dance Notation

So just publicly posted a video to YouTube. Mang, it’s been slow going on those public videos. I think being so secretive at FB for those two years was really not so good for my creative process. Also, like YouTube has changed a LOT since I started posting, so I think navigating that new landscape is a bit of a beast, too. Anyhow, enough of my hangups with the internet as an old man : ) Onto the video:

Okay, so in the video I talk about a lot of things I want to link out to. First off…

Kai’s work on Annotating / Visualizing Tutting

So Kai is a dancer I’ve known for a long time. He produced these really cool visuals on Tutting if you’re interested:

Plenty more of those images on his Pinterest board on the topic of the Grid, which also has links to videos.

Lego Tutting

Using Bricklink Studio, I created a Lego version of the tut sequence. If you want, you can download and install Bricklink Studio (it’s free), and peep at the source file of my work by downloading and running this.

Using what I discovered in Bricklink Studio, I made this animation. The source PSD is here, if you’re curious. It has guidelines and stuff, too.

Where I learned the Tut Scale

I learned it from Houdoken in person, and fortunately we filmed it. You can hear the students in attendance gasp at the concept of this scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XQrlIEYFPg&t=5m10s

Also, I talk at great length about this topic in this other video:

Catch the Beat

This is the VR rhythm game I made before Beat Saber was a thing. Or at least before I heard of it. You can get Catch the Beat from itch.io. Here’s me playing it:

Here’s a video of someone else playing it:

To learn juggling, flip into a flow state. To flip into a flow state: GROOVE. Track: "In My City" by @ElliottLaRue pic.twitter.com/JB976vihhD

— Dance Face (@ThisIsDANCEFACE) December 19, 2017

ASDFJKL; update -- video of difficult song, new visualization, and storyboards of VR experience

In my last blog post I shared a link to a really difficult song. I decided to try to make a video of me playing / performing the song:

Another Visualization…

I built a new visualization on key input. It more closely emulates the shape of a keyboard:

I like that the mapping doesn’t have “a” and “;” right next to each other.

I don’t know why I’m attached to this circular shape. Maybe this is just an arrangement that feels like it maps closer to how my brain thinks about keys. Not sure. Maybe I should also just try a straight line across with this pattern.

Sketchy storyboards of an ASDFJKL; crossover VR experience…

I have very vague plans for converting all this json data into a VR rhythm game… meaning that you could encode some choreography on a website, and then experience that choreography in VR in the space around you.. Anyhow, I made a few sketches describing how I might imagine doing this.

The main idea from my scrawlings are that the player sees ASDFJKL; in front of them like a xylophone or wood blocks. They have to strike these objects that are thrown it at them with their wands. I think the objects that you need to strike are tossed in and respect gravity, but maybe at half or quarter gravity.

The neat part is I’ve done most of this work already. Catch the beat has the throwing mechanic. I believe I have an ASDFJKL; choreography interpreter in a sketch somewhere. I think those are the major things for now… will want to build a prototype environment for just me to try, film it, and share those results when I can.

ASDFJKL; -- new hard song, and dev on visualizations

One of the shows I really enjoyed recently was Halt and Catch Fire. In addition to it being a great show, it also has a pretty amazing theme song. Take a listen:

So anyhow, I made an ASDFJKL; song for it. The choreography is pretty challenging, but I feel pretty proud about it:

https://albert.github.io/asdfjklsemi/?v=yD_kCKiSkoI&choreo=32488779637710864

Also, on top of that, yesterday I made a visualization of my key input for ASDFJKL;. It’s offline only, but here’s a gif of the experience. I guess I’m just curious to see what different ways there are to visualize homerow interaction…

Updates to ASDFJKL;

I made many updates to the game. You can play the game here:

https://albert.github.io/#asdfjklsemi

This is a continuation of the work mentioned two posts ago.

I’m happy with the progress and have been getting some good feedback. Most of the work was ironing out the user flow to make it way less confusing. Then I posted to social media and got some good response.

The biggest power user as of right now is my buddy Drew Stone (@stonedrew), who made a handful of good ones. Here’s on he shared with me that has some pretty solid choreographic composition!

a screenshot a level Drew designed:

https://albert.github.io/asdfjklsemi/?v=_GXL7e_1ybw&choreo=73928470443512200

As I was developing all these updates, I realized that I was totally under-using something that I, by chance, had. Back in around 2008-ish I was working for a nifty web firm and, as a part of the gig, someone registered me for some system with the username “Albert”. Well, that system turned out to be Github. So because of this, I was at the right place at the right time to get github.com/albert. This also means that I get albert.github.io as well.

I’ve had stuff hosted on there for a while, but it was completely raw HTML and no styling, so I replaced that with a minimal markup and a smidge of CSS. It’s still a super bare site, but at least it doesn’t look like an error message anymore.

Not completely sure how that URL relates to albert-hwang.com. Maybe I’m looking for a fresh start? Anyhow, good problems to have, I think.

It's refreshing to be back out in the public again

When I moved to Seattle, one of my goals was to get involved in the new media arts / tech scene out here. I wanted to go to meetups and share my perspective and bounce ideas off of others.

But when I arrived, I started working for a company that didn’t really want me to be social. My creativity wasn’t really allowed to be expressed in a public manner because of PR fears. They didn’t want any of their employees / contractors to say things that caused controversy.

Well, I finished that job in January, and things are slowly changing for the better. Additionally, I’m at a new gig at Looking Glass Factory that wants me to be more public across the board Here’s a list of a handful of things I’ve been back at engaging with the public now that I’m a free digital person again.

I presented at 4 public events

So the public events I’ve recently been at were:

• OMSI After Dark in Portland to demo the Looking Glass

• East Side VR in Bellevue to demo the Looking Glass

• The Seattle Arts and Technology to share my history w/ 3d display tech, including Looking Glass & Lumarca

• Seattle VR as a panelist on the topic of AR / VR UX design

This last one was particularly interesting for me. I loved blabbing about my opinions and also engaging with the two other panelists, who were clearly super well-informed on the topic. It’s also nice to occasionally take a step back (as I did in these last two public appearances) and to reframe my career, which has been kind of a wile ride.

Anyhow, here’s a shot of me in a panel.

(shot by Alexandra Steele, https://twitter.com/EmergentStgy/status/1111455207433474048)

I’ve been posting to my blog, sorta

This is the third post since leaving my job. It feels good to simply share some of the things I’m super curious about lately. The previous two posts were for projects that I had knocking around for a while, but am happy now to sort of let them go…

I’ve been posting videos

I’m taking a smidge of a pause with my YouTube account. Not that I’m a YouTube star or anything, but I find my subscriber count on YouTube to be a little overwhelming — so much so that I feel that if I post it really ought to be edited down and not be super rambly. Well, that and I should either turn off comments or be okay with… uhm… you know, YouTube comments. I mean, my last YouTube video I posted has literally one comment:

Ugh… Hard for me to motivate myself to engage w/ this audience and to ask them to remember to like and subscribe. Like what am I doing on this platform?

Anyhow, as an alternative low-pressure way for me to still have a creative outlet, I’ve instead jumped onto another video service: https://diode.zone/video-channels/albert_channel/videos. Diode.zone is an instance of peertube — which is a federated version of YouTube. It I love it! It reminds me of what YouTube used to be for me — just a place to document my unfiltered crappy progress updates and rambly rants.

I’m making a game, sort of…

A lot of what I’ve been doing on diode.zone is documenting my process for building a game. It’s in it’s super infant stages. I currently have two participants and am learning a lot from how they’re engaging (and often not engaging) with what I want them to do. Anyhow, I don’t know if I can convert this into a real game, but so far it’s been a fun and healthy process.