Winter 2010 Documentation

All of my formal documentation for the Winter 2010 semester projects can be found at the following links:

realTime: Click here
telePresence: Click here
Querying.me final project: Click here

Final Project: At the show

At the show, we set up our table like a voting booth. We created 50 different cards, each with 3 questions (asked by users), and two answers set in a multiple choice fashion: one answer was from our answer database (thereby created by a human), whereas another question came from a machine. As users voted on which answer they were the most comfortable with, we tallied up the results. Posters were placed all over the place. One advertised the importance and greatness of machines, whereas the other advertised the importance and greatness of humans. As the show started to dwindle down, we presented which answers got the most votes. In the end, surprisingly, it turned out that human answers received the most votes.

We created two voting booths out of foam-core board (due to its relative inexpensiveness, durability, and easiness to cut and modify). The booths were placed beside each other on the table. Because it was dark in the room, we brought in two ordinary desk lamps to help illuminate the booths. People simply took a ballot from one of our group members sitting at the table, voted in the booths, then dropped their ballot off in a ballot box.

In the end the entire show was a success, as was the project. We were very glad when people were telling us they were having a hard time picking answers (which means the machine answer was obviously in the running instead of being some random result) and they seemed pretty interested with our thesis.

Final Project: The Final Idea

We decided to remove the aspect of real-time, in a sense. Although we liked the idea of having a human answer/ask a question followed up with a machine answer, there were simply too many problems associated with that idea to make us comfortable. We decided to make a website that would allow users to answer and ask a question. It can be found at http://querying.me/ . The website was simply enough to build and it was finished about 2 weeks before the show so that gave us more than enough time to send the site out to the network of friends on facebook and twitter to bring in a bunch of people. Just like in our original project, the idea of asking and answering a question was present. On the website, users would see a question at the top of the page and they would be given the chance to answer. When they typed in the answer and hit enter or the submit button, a new question would display, and they could answer that question if they so wished as well. Of course they could refresh the page if they did not like the question. The questions were coming from a database. Users could “ask” a question if they felt like it. Those questions they ask would be fed into the database and would randomly appear in the “answer” section of the website. By the end of the two week period we had a total of 290 questions with 1950 answers. This was way more than we would have gotten at the show, so this idea worked out perfectly.

In our own time before the show, our group went to answers.com and fed in questions that people had asked. We took the first line of the answer and made that a choice. If answers.com did not have an answer, we would write in “Does not compute.” We always made “a” the human answer and “b” the machine answer.

Final Project solutions

After trying to figure out how we could solve the issues regarding bringing people into the project and having to deal with a good number of people on both ends of the project to make it work as planned, we decided to modify the project a little bit. In doing so, we hoped to avoid the problems that we were having a hard time solving. It was difficult to solve since we did not know a few variables associated with this show, mainly those of “how many people are going to be here?” and “how many people will be in each location at once?” That second question was quite important. If everyone was at one location (for example, many more people being at the Ryerson location rather than the OCAD location) then our project would not work properly.

Since we liked the idea of working with human vs. machine, and since our instructors liked the way we were trying to answer the questions raised within our thesis (that being if people would prefer human-made answers or machine-made answers) we decided that modifying the idea would not be in our best interests. Instead, we modified the physical aspect of the project.

Final Project problems

The original ideal did not hold up as well as originally planned. Although the idea of having one user ask a question and another user answer the question, a few flaws were pointed out. Firstly, there was a reliance on having a second person at the answer kiosk, otherwise the question-asking user would not see an answer right away. Chances are, people will not wait around to receive an answer. Likewise, for the answering user, they would not receive any feedback. So, for them, the project would seem kind of meaningless. Another problem we had was trying to figure out how to attract people to our project. Simply having two computers sit alone would not make for the best and most attractive piece. Unless the piece would draw people in, the issues mentioned earlier would become even more blaring. We had to set out to figure out a way to either modify our project a little bit, or come up with solutions to these problems.

Final Project Idea

Original Draft Idea:

I’ll be working with Gavin and Adam for this. We have decided to make a real-time question/answer system where a user will be able to ask a question on one computer. On another compete located in a completely different area, a viewer will be able to see the user type their question, in real time, and answer it immediately. We were thinking of having a station at Ryerson and the other at OCAD. One station would deal with users asking questions, and the other would deal with the answers. The stations would feature a stand alone monitor and keyboard. Another computer would be enclosed within a locked box (for security purposes) – the monitor would simply be hooked up to this computer.

The monitor for the question would state “Ask me anything. What would you like to know?” A text box would be placed below. The user could type their question here. In real time, the question would be seen on the other machine. The answer station would display the statement of, “Someone has a question… have you got an answer?”. The user at that station would then answer and send the message back in real time. When the answer is received at the original station, a message saying, “Was this help” will be displayed. If the person selects “yes”, it will be fed into a database of correctly answered questions. If the machines are left idle, unanswered questions will display until someone decides to answer one.

Etch-a-Sketch

For the Telepresence, not Appearance project, my group decided to remake the idea of the classic Etch-a-Sketch toy. We are going to use two bicycle wheels as the control wheels. The wheels will be in different rooms. One wheel will control the x-axis of the drawing, whereas the other wheel will control the y-axis. The drawing of the line will depend on the speed and rate in which the user is turning the wheel. The visualizations will be done in processing and displayed on a set of computers (so the user can see what they are doing). We will use a set of sensors and gray patterns to have the computer determine how fast the user is spinning the wheel (to control the speed of drawing in the Processing sketch) and also to determine the current position of the wheel.

To connect our project with another classmate’s project, we have decided that we will take data from someone elses’ project (still to be determined which). We need raw numbers that we can map to certain values required for our sketch. We are thinking of linking to Adam and Paul’s project. They have something that will become either sad or happy in relation to data from yet another project. In our case, when their project gets sad, it will influence the drawing on our etch-a-sketch. For example, the sadder their piece gets, the more difficult it is to draw (the line gets squiggly instead of straight, the wheel has to be turned faster for it to actually draw, etc) on the etch-a-sketch.

We were originally going to create a mechanical etch-a-sketch using motors and tracks that would act as the Processing sketch. While this is surely possible to build, due to time constraints of less than a week, we thought it best to keep it simple and stay in Processing at this time.

Here are the answers to some of the questions we had to ponder:

1. Paint Chip Colour: We picked yellow, although we did so more because of the name of the colour, which was Railroad Tracks. The tracks relate to “direction” which we felt emphasized the drawing aspect of our project.
2. Which human sense does the piece focus on: Mainly visual (since the user will be seeing what they sketch), however it will also focus on touch (touching and playing with the wheels).
3. What does the piece want to share: Shares a drawing experience between multiple people. The only data transmitted will be as peed, provided in numerical values.
4. What does your work want to receive: Since we are thinking of using Adam and Pauls’ project, we’ll need to access the information given off by their piece depending on it’s state of emotion.
5. Is the piece an introvert of extrovert: We aren’t too sure. The piece will ask for information, which isn’t something an introvert would do, so it seems it is more of an extrovert.
6. What emotion most strongly characterizes the piece: Confusion and curiosity, because you really do not know what is going to happen (knowing how the line will be influenced by external factors [eg. other users, the other data feeds], for example).

Reading 1 – “Telepresence Art”

The Summery

Interactive art is almost strictly about behaviour over composition. Viewers become active in shaping the art piece and shaping their own experience with the piece.

“Media” relates to the transmission of information from one point to another single point, whereas “mass media” relates to the transmission of data from one point to a large amount of other points.

Cyberspace is synthetic space. Man and machine are often seen as one. “Memory” on a computer is obviously a biological thing. If a human is properly equipped it can interact with others in a digital environment through transmission of images and sound.

Virtual reality relates to the images computers show that represent computer data. In optics, virtual relates to objects within, for example, a mirror. The objects are not actually real. Real stands for whatever shares spacetime. To witness virtual reality, one must be enclosed within cyberspace.

Teleprescence is the remote controlling of a real object while the user is inside cyberspace. A good example not written here might be doctors being able to preform surgery from kilometers away with the use of robotics and networking. Participants are able to experience events from perspectives and scales that are not common to us.

Telepresence is bidirectional. It differs from a phone line and the unidirectional reception of television broadcasts. Mass media is not communication: it is a one way show. Home viewers cannot often interact with what is being broadcast on screen from the studio. Telepresence is a fusion of mediums. From far away, someone, through digital space, is able to change and modify something in the real world. “Getting in touch” relates to phoning someone. People are getting into relationships via the internet. Soon we may be able to touch someone without actually doing it in the same space. It is up to new media artists to generate new aesthetic experiences that incorporate the bidirectional and multidirectional communication forms.

How will the increasing irrelevancy of distance and real space change society? Paul Virilio suggests the transmission of video has become a new “place”. Video has become very popular. Virilio says that the role of the image “is to be everywhere, to be reality.” Practically everything in society today involves images in some way. Our images did not duplicate reality, they gave it shape. The shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line, it is real time. The only separation now are time zones.

Equipment normally used in science for data collection (robots, phones, etc) is used differently in art. It lets us address “the complexity of our perception in the age of media.” We see due to pre-laid networks that allow us to recognize illuminated objects as important. The screen does not fully separate us from reality, however it acts as a door between two spaces.

“Ornitorrinco” is an art piece where the distance between the installation and the art shoe is three miles. Users press keys on a telephone which controls a robot, named Ornitorrinco. The keypad offers specific instructions (1 is go left, 2 is move forward, etc). Pressing 5 makes the robot send an image back. Due to distance and infrastructure limits, there is a 6 second delay between pressing a button and the robot hearing the new instruction. The user can only see the space after requesting an image. Therefore the space is not actually experience by humans: we must rely on the robot to do the seeing for us.

The Response

This article helped clear up the confusion between cyberspace, virtual reality, and telepresence. I liked how Kac concluded by talking about his own piece in relation to what he was saying in the previous parts of the essay which made everything tie together. I kept thinking back to the stories heard on the news regularity of technology that will allow doctors to perform surgery from their own studio to, say, the international space station, will with the aid of robotics and networks. Seeing people on a Skype video-to-video chat is certainly better than a phone chat (since images tend to do better than audio), however it is still missing the “in person” feel that many of us still wish we had more of. Of course, as mentioned in the article, there may be a time when it is somehow possible to touch someone else without even being in the same room as them. As someone practicing new media it will be interesting to take this relatively new phenomenon, play with it, and help define what it is.

The Presentation

Safe to say the presentation went over fairly well. The visualizations worked properly after some last minute tweaking and everyone seemed to enjoy the game. We were glad

As Greg and I concerned about, there were a few times when the two pieces of stryofoam used to protect the pressure sensor stuck together after someone jumped on it, causing the pad to continue reading data until one of us quickly lifted up a piece of styrofoam to reset the sensor. It didn’t effect things too much however it was obviously a bit of a design flaw. There was also a slight problem with the audio but that was easily fixed after the presentation (I forgot to set buffer lengths which seemed to make the audio lag and blip).

To fix it for Dave Green’s presentation we decided that we will add a few springs to each corner of the styrofoam. This way, after someone jumps on the pad, the top piece will spring back up which will fix the problem of the pieces getting stuck together.

The documentation for the piece can be found here: http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/agam/courses/year3/mpm35_week12.html

Unfortunately the video we shot during the presentation got corrupted on the camera for whatever reason. We will re-shoot the video when we present again in Green’s class.

Dealing with projector resolution

This was a problem that came up the night before presenting. I realized that the resolution of the projects in the room would obviously not match the resolution of my Macbook Pro. To my memory, the projects had a resolution of either 800 x 600 or something like 1024 x 768. Regardless it was not a widescreen resolution, and this could prove to be real trouble since the Processing windows were taking up the entire Macbook Pro screen.

Because of this, we might have to alter our plans or try to sort something out tomorrow. If the projector can indeed reach higher resolution levels, then fantastic. If not (and one can’t be found that does), then we will simply play everything off of the Macbook Pro screen. After testing out to see if the same effect was portrayed when playing on a smallish screen (obviously having a projection would be much better) we decided that playing off of the computer will be fine if necessary. Regardless, having everything appear on a small screen would make more sense than having a projector cut off large amounts of the visualizations making them much less effective.