Click on the links below to get to respective posts.
Brainstorming
3D models
Three directions
Refinements for final direction (sketches)
1
2
Screen grabs of the final
Readings:
1
2
3
4
Showing posts with label readings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label readings. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
MX: Reading response #4 (page 103-115)
The first thing that made me think in the Fourth reading was this: "... the viewing subject, who now exists in two spaces: the familiar physical space of her real body and the virtual space of an image within the screen" (p. 104) How many people take pictures when they visit a new place or see friends they haven't seen for a long time? That moment does not exist anymore, but it is captured on your screen that has the uploaded image. With the WWW people can access information that embodies a specific space or moment of the physical space and partake in the experience. This could only become possible with the development of digital photography that lets you see what happened on the other side of the world in less then ten minutes after it happened.
Digital photography, however, leaves no surprises. We take a snapshot, look at the LCD display and voila! or image is ready. You don't even have to print it out: it is more detailed on the screen. This type of photography is good for people who merely want to take a picture and don't have to add depth to the image. The paragraph about the tented camera and the early processes of printing and developing images makes was educational and helpful. Patience and surprise that were two essential components of photography. Preparations for it were difficult and slow and you could never guess what the image would look like. That carries a huge appeal to me. How can this be introduced into or design projects, both printed and digital? This is a big question for me because of my interest in print media that has so much potential for discovery and surprise.
The beginning of the paragraph about personalized cinema (p.107) says that classical film made a connection with each viewer and positioned him inside its virtual world. I think that good photography can do the same thing, sometimes better. When watching a film we are accepting the reality of the character or the director that depicted their perception of the world. When looking at photography, a still image with a specific moment depicted on a sheet of paper, we make the image our own. We see what WE want to see for as long as we want to see it. Because of photography's static nature, we can be fully absorbed in it. How many times have you looked at an image for a minute, just to realize you've spent half an hour looking? I see photography inviting the viewer to look and think and the moving image to view and then think. Baudry sees the immobility of the spectator seen in photography an essential condition of cinematic pleasure (p. 109). It is a little bit disturbing that this reading crosses out everything good about the older technology in order to "promote" the newer one. Nobody in the reading says that the moving image is better that photography, but the bias is still there. This is the aspect of this reading I do not enjoy.
The part where the reading discusses Visual Reality is touching upon some interesting points. The viewer was attached to the computer like a mouse while offered physical "freedom" of digital interaction. Even thought the modern-day iPhones and other technology like that are not literally VR, it transports us from our real physical reality to whatever we choose to see. It may not offer us a literal absorption in virtuality, but it gives us freedom to participate in the reality we choose on-the-go.
Overall, the reading gave pretty good insight in how much technology developed and advanced and made me think of the advantages and disadvantages of the older media.
Digital photography, however, leaves no surprises. We take a snapshot, look at the LCD display and voila! or image is ready. You don't even have to print it out: it is more detailed on the screen. This type of photography is good for people who merely want to take a picture and don't have to add depth to the image. The paragraph about the tented camera and the early processes of printing and developing images makes was educational and helpful. Patience and surprise that were two essential components of photography. Preparations for it were difficult and slow and you could never guess what the image would look like. That carries a huge appeal to me. How can this be introduced into or design projects, both printed and digital? This is a big question for me because of my interest in print media that has so much potential for discovery and surprise.
The beginning of the paragraph about personalized cinema (p.107) says that classical film made a connection with each viewer and positioned him inside its virtual world. I think that good photography can do the same thing, sometimes better. When watching a film we are accepting the reality of the character or the director that depicted their perception of the world. When looking at photography, a still image with a specific moment depicted on a sheet of paper, we make the image our own. We see what WE want to see for as long as we want to see it. Because of photography's static nature, we can be fully absorbed in it. How many times have you looked at an image for a minute, just to realize you've spent half an hour looking? I see photography inviting the viewer to look and think and the moving image to view and then think. Baudry sees the immobility of the spectator seen in photography an essential condition of cinematic pleasure (p. 109). It is a little bit disturbing that this reading crosses out everything good about the older technology in order to "promote" the newer one. Nobody in the reading says that the moving image is better that photography, but the bias is still there. This is the aspect of this reading I do not enjoy.
The part where the reading discusses Visual Reality is touching upon some interesting points. The viewer was attached to the computer like a mouse while offered physical "freedom" of digital interaction. Even thought the modern-day iPhones and other technology like that are not literally VR, it transports us from our real physical reality to whatever we choose to see. It may not offer us a literal absorption in virtuality, but it gives us freedom to participate in the reality we choose on-the-go.
Overall, the reading gave pretty good insight in how much technology developed and advanced and made me think of the advantages and disadvantages of the older media.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
MX: Reading response #3 (page 94-103)
When I read the first paragraph of the reading, especially the phrase "it's a society of the screen" I immediately thought about how fast we adjust to new screen based-technology. I happened to witness a college student being introduced to a new touch-screen equipment at the gym. It was never there before and it took her less then three minutes to set it up and get things going. Such task would be a nightmare for older generations. The screen became our language and is easy for us to understand. But what about those who lived all their lives in the world where screens or "large TVs" were a futuristic idea from Farenheit 451?
I think that in our web-based designs we should always strive for innovation and progress, but we should not leave those people behind. There should be a way for people to take a traditional route. Maybe it is not as prominent as it used to be 10-15 years ago, when the buttons were boxy and the home page was always labeled as "home", but it should make some sense to older people. It's good when a website can be navigated by an 80-year-old grandma and an art director of a high-end motion studio. I thought that the comparison of a screen to a Renaissance painting was pretty interesting. The screen is not so new after all.
The reading describes the screen as a "window into another space". Moving images on the screen are not shocking to us anymore, but first film screenings made the ladies faint and men run in horror. Back then the window was so hyper-real that people could not wrap their mind around it. The reading says that the screen is aggressive, it is meant to force the viewer to filter out the outside real world and fully focus on the presented picture. The reading says that the computer screen does not fully keep our attention because we can view multiple windows at once and "zap" through them. It's true in some cases, but we can only focus on one image at a time. Even if we have ten windows open, we focus on one, or two if we're comparing something. If whatever we're looking at is relevant to our task at hand or interests us in some way, we get fully absorbed by it. So how is it different from watching tv or a movie? Yes, the image may often be still in a computer screen and thus more easily "paused", but the concept is the same.
"Now she is fully situated within this other space", says the reading. The mention of VR surrounding a person once again reminds me of Farenheit 451. Here's a quote that talks about Montag's impression of the room with three huge screens:"And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony."
The comparison of a radar screen to an audio record was quite interesting. The whole section about photography vs. real time imagery was quite enlightening. It made me think of technology that is not as distanced from us as the military surveillance. Look at Skype for instance. All you need is two cameras and internet connection Voila!, two people can talk across continents and time zones. The screen literally becomes a window into another world. Two separate physical spaces become connected. It is still an image (it becomes non-transparent and obvious when the connection fails and the video quality becomes extremely pixellated), but it's a real time image. Compared to the days when you would send your picture to someone in an envelope along side a hand-written cursive note, Skype and similar technology are incredible!
The constant progress of technology and the presence of the screen makes the line between the physical world and the screen thinner and thinner. It is not a bad or a good thing, it's our reality. Hopefully, this progress will not make our world the horror so described so well in Bradbury's work.
I think that in our web-based designs we should always strive for innovation and progress, but we should not leave those people behind. There should be a way for people to take a traditional route. Maybe it is not as prominent as it used to be 10-15 years ago, when the buttons were boxy and the home page was always labeled as "home", but it should make some sense to older people. It's good when a website can be navigated by an 80-year-old grandma and an art director of a high-end motion studio. I thought that the comparison of a screen to a Renaissance painting was pretty interesting. The screen is not so new after all.
The reading describes the screen as a "window into another space". Moving images on the screen are not shocking to us anymore, but first film screenings made the ladies faint and men run in horror. Back then the window was so hyper-real that people could not wrap their mind around it. The reading says that the screen is aggressive, it is meant to force the viewer to filter out the outside real world and fully focus on the presented picture. The reading says that the computer screen does not fully keep our attention because we can view multiple windows at once and "zap" through them. It's true in some cases, but we can only focus on one image at a time. Even if we have ten windows open, we focus on one, or two if we're comparing something. If whatever we're looking at is relevant to our task at hand or interests us in some way, we get fully absorbed by it. So how is it different from watching tv or a movie? Yes, the image may often be still in a computer screen and thus more easily "paused", but the concept is the same.
"Now she is fully situated within this other space", says the reading. The mention of VR surrounding a person once again reminds me of Farenheit 451. Here's a quote that talks about Montag's impression of the room with three huge screens:"And it was indeed remarkable. Something had happened. Even though the people in the walls of the room had barely moved, and nothing had really been settled, you had the impression that someone had turned on a washing-machine or sucked you up in a gigantic vacuum. You drowned in music and pure cacophony."
The comparison of a radar screen to an audio record was quite interesting. The whole section about photography vs. real time imagery was quite enlightening. It made me think of technology that is not as distanced from us as the military surveillance. Look at Skype for instance. All you need is two cameras and internet connection Voila!, two people can talk across continents and time zones. The screen literally becomes a window into another world. Two separate physical spaces become connected. It is still an image (it becomes non-transparent and obvious when the connection fails and the video quality becomes extremely pixellated), but it's a real time image. Compared to the days when you would send your picture to someone in an envelope along side a hand-written cursive note, Skype and similar technology are incredible!
The constant progress of technology and the presence of the screen makes the line between the physical world and the screen thinner and thinner. It is not a bad or a good thing, it's our reality. Hopefully, this progress will not make our world the horror so described so well in Bradbury's work.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
MX: Reading response #2 (page 78-93)
One of the things the reading hit dead on was the difference between the cinema "user" and the computer interface user. The person who appreciated film could understand its language, but could not speak it while the computer user both understands and speaks the interface language. This is relevant to our Community project. It made us realize how the system works, what should be kept in mind when creating a user-generated website and taught us basic programming language.
The paragraph about the cinematic frame is also relevant to Multimedia class. By making the user scroll to see more images, i am showing him something that is outside the given frame. I show him that there is a world beyond the browser.
The article also talks about the way the user often has options in the way he can preview information. Dolly movement, scroll, etc can create a narration that will help the user transition from one are to the other. I think this is a big innovation in interface design compared to the cinematic display and the eye are that option of transitions and navigation. Cinema always makes the transitions a part of the film and controls your perception while various options of transitioning helps you be the creator.
When the article talks about the Dungeon Keeper and the ways it can switch the view from action to the bird's eye view, it reminds me of the image/word cloud Kyle and I had in the project. It is a different idea, but has a same idea of accommodation for the user.
I found the Berlin project quite innovational. It is making the project 3D, but also incorporates media that was created way before the computer and uses it for the display of data rather than a cinematic image in itself.
The paragraph about the cinematic frame is also relevant to Multimedia class. By making the user scroll to see more images, i am showing him something that is outside the given frame. I show him that there is a world beyond the browser.
The article also talks about the way the user often has options in the way he can preview information. Dolly movement, scroll, etc can create a narration that will help the user transition from one are to the other. I think this is a big innovation in interface design compared to the cinematic display and the eye are that option of transitions and navigation. Cinema always makes the transitions a part of the film and controls your perception while various options of transitioning helps you be the creator.
When the article talks about the Dungeon Keeper and the ways it can switch the view from action to the bird's eye view, it reminds me of the image/word cloud Kyle and I had in the project. It is a different idea, but has a same idea of accommodation for the user.
I found the Berlin project quite innovational. It is making the project 3D, but also incorporates media that was created way before the computer and uses it for the display of data rather than a cinematic image in itself.
MX: Reading response #1 (page 63-78)
This reading presented a lot of things to think about and was quite enlightening in terms of historical development of the World Wide Web and it's sequencing, cultural metaphors and differences.
The "cut and paste" metaphor the reading talks about goes back to the class discussion we had recently. Even though it is referencing a physical action of putting something in a different place, it is used for a all kinds of digital media: you "cut and paste" text from one document to another and you "cut and paste" video files and links.
The reading talks about the difference between two different types of relationship between content and interface. In earlier websites and interfaces the accessible data is already there at the time of access, other websites generate data during the user's presence on the given website. This made me think of the interactive project we did in Sound and Motion. We were creating a set of guides for the user, but had no idea what they were going to do with it. The mentioned Tamagotchi toy is a great example too. I remember it being something that was taking a life of its own, instead of following the set commands.
The paragraph about the computer being a tool vs a separate media was quite interesting to me. It makes me think of our current project and how it will be viewed and assessed by users. The computer was for a long time viewed as a replacement of the typewriter, that was essentially a tool for printing text. I remember that in the mid '90s my friends would send me drawings printed out from what now seems to be prehistoric program Paint. That was the definition of computer art for me and many people. Websites resembled physical pages that sequentially displayed information. (I thought that the way the author talked about print was a pretty superficial and general analysis. Print is not always linear, it's not always a rectangular physical object that displays information in a sequence. While trying to describe the innovations of digital media, the author generalized other mediums that he labeled "print" and "cinema".) The newer versions introduced hyperlinking (hypermedia) that makes all components of the page equal in hierarchy. This is relevant to our current project that allows the user access information that appeals to him most. It is usually a display of works that lets the viewer explore in a non-linear fashion.
The concept of the web being a flat surface with information presented in a random order can be connected to my portfolio idea that is essentially a surface with works presented on it. The article also does a pretty good job of comparing the "pages" to previously designed ways of presenting a sequencing information. The comparison of the webpage to a papyrus scroll was smart and innovational!
The "cut and paste" metaphor the reading talks about goes back to the class discussion we had recently. Even though it is referencing a physical action of putting something in a different place, it is used for a all kinds of digital media: you "cut and paste" text from one document to another and you "cut and paste" video files and links.
The reading talks about the difference between two different types of relationship between content and interface. In earlier websites and interfaces the accessible data is already there at the time of access, other websites generate data during the user's presence on the given website. This made me think of the interactive project we did in Sound and Motion. We were creating a set of guides for the user, but had no idea what they were going to do with it. The mentioned Tamagotchi toy is a great example too. I remember it being something that was taking a life of its own, instead of following the set commands.
The paragraph about the computer being a tool vs a separate media was quite interesting to me. It makes me think of our current project and how it will be viewed and assessed by users. The computer was for a long time viewed as a replacement of the typewriter, that was essentially a tool for printing text. I remember that in the mid '90s my friends would send me drawings printed out from what now seems to be prehistoric program Paint. That was the definition of computer art for me and many people. Websites resembled physical pages that sequentially displayed information. (I thought that the way the author talked about print was a pretty superficial and general analysis. Print is not always linear, it's not always a rectangular physical object that displays information in a sequence. While trying to describe the innovations of digital media, the author generalized other mediums that he labeled "print" and "cinema".) The newer versions introduced hyperlinking (hypermedia) that makes all components of the page equal in hierarchy. This is relevant to our current project that allows the user access information that appeals to him most. It is usually a display of works that lets the viewer explore in a non-linear fashion.
The concept of the web being a flat surface with information presented in a random order can be connected to my portfolio idea that is essentially a surface with works presented on it. The article also does a pretty good job of comparing the "pages" to previously designed ways of presenting a sequencing information. The comparison of the webpage to a papyrus scroll was smart and innovational!
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