voyeurism

Christmas greetings from the Captain and crew of the SS Galaxy!

the Captain and crew of the SS Galaxy would like to thank all our guests - past and present - for the privilege of having served you.

blessings of peace and joy to all in our community - onboard and in RL :-)

a blessed Christmas to all :-)

this year, my annual Christmas episode weighs in at 4 MB.

i should say that it contains a spoiler about Tron: Legacy, so if you haven't yet watched the movie but were intending to, feel free to listen to the episode a little later :-)

the Scripture passage is taken from Genesis 22: 13, 14.

Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to his day it is said, "On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided."

wherever in the world you're listening from, i wish you and your loved ones the peace and joy that only the Christchild can bring :-)

introducing inim8 - an animation-authoring app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad

my good friend Yuan Tao has come up with his first app for iOS!

inim8 for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is an easy-to-use app which allows for the authoring of animations, which could be used as scaffolds during language-lessons :-) it retails for USD$1.99.

here's the description of inim8 :-)

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Creating animations has never come this close to you on the iPhone and iPod touch. Unlike other animation apps which requires you to draw every frame in your animation, iNim8 demands almost "no drawing" skill from you at all! All you have to do is to create your character once, make it strike cool poses and hit the "play" button. You will see your characters walking/running/dancing/fighting/doing all kinds of crazy stuff instantly.

iNim8 is simple and fun. It is designed for both animation hobbyist and beginner. It is also suitable for teaching or learning animations. If you always love animation and have the desire or curiosity to animate something yourself , then wait no more and try iNim8! And don't forget to impress your friend with that little short film you have created!

Features:

- rotate and translate shapes without the need of drawing them on every frame

- key frame based animation which doesn't require drawing every frame, instead users "define" the key frame and the app will create all the in-between frames

- a scrollable timeline for users to browse through key frames quickly

- allows user to adjust timing by tuning the frame index

- instant preview your animation before converting it to video file

- setting the start/end key for previewing a segment of the animation

- animate characters on different layers

- animatable camera with pan and zoom capability

- allows both straight-ahead and pose-to-pose animation

- copy/paste key frames on individual layers

- onion skins to show the action sequence

- A template editor for users to create or customize their own characters

- video tutorials and quick reference to guide beginners started quickly

- email your animation clip or upload to youtube to share with your friend

- with pre-installed stick figure and clips, user can start to animate straight away

Parallelisms - a brief essay on Tron, hydropneumatics, and Citroëns

Does God exist?

Please pardon this pretentious way of initiating a conversation, but one can't help thinking about the nature of the Divine - one could say we have been designed to do so.

Such thoughts have been on my mind over the past twelve hours, because it's been one of those days when too many things have concurrently happened that help you have a deeper appreciation of what Depeche Mode meant when they said that "God has a sense of humour".

Even this throwback to the lyrics of a song written at the height of 1980s New Wave is appropriate to today's philosophical poser, because watching Tron: Legacy reeks of self-referetialism to a simpler time of chunky graphics and opaque lines of code.

Indeed opacity - or rather the tension between opacity and transparency - is a running theme within Tron: Legacy, and by some curious happy happenstance (i'm deliberately steering away from the 'c' word) - in the context of a metaverse so full of data that it's literally leaking at the seams - it lends the timing of the release of the movie a topicality that its producers could only have dreamed of.

In my personal pantheon of all-time cool movies, Tron: Legacy is definitely way up there, alongside Gattaca and The Truman Show. Like the latter two, Tron: Legacy succeeds because it provokes thinking about the nature of the human condition.

Emerging from the cinema after the philosophical- and cognitive-LSD-induced-overload that is Tron: Legacy, i experienced a multi-sensory meltdown - i guess it was like waking up from a deep slumber: there were sights and sounds around me but i struggled to make sense of them.

And that must be why i found my favourite car underwhelming.

Could a Citroën ever be a letdown?

Umm yes… stand up please, LN, AX, ZX and Saxo.

Could a Citroën ever be an anticlimax?

i hadn't thought so… till yesterday.

The Citroën in question was the C5 1.6 THP 6-speed automatic… with conventional steel suspension.

i hate to say it, but i do not think that that latter factor - admittedly the most obvious candidate - is the primary reason for why i find myself struggling to think of anything to write about the car.

Yes, there were three people in the car, yes, traffic conditions were not ideal, but even when gaps did open up, i could summon sufficient forward thrust and at regulable rates, but… but did i have fun driving the car? did i experience a moment of epiphany?

Maybe God dispenses a maximum of one epiphany per day, and i had already had mine, cinematically.

You want to know specifics about the car? Well, its steering is lighter than that in my C5 2.0, it tends to creep less while at a standstill, and yes, road-surface imperfections do come through and are more sharply felt.

And… oh yes, those LED DRLs do look cool.

But does it engage you in questions of existentialism like the best (ie, hydropneumatic) Citroëns do?

Bearing in mind that i have every intention of getting a DS5 (which will not available with hydropneumatic suspension) in 2013 - i have to say the jury is still out on that one.

So… enough about the car. Let's go back to more interesting questions, about, say, the existence of God.

Timing is everything in humour, and as a Christian i firmly believe that the timing of yesterday's events - in which two long-eagerly-anticipated-events took place (without prior planning) within the space of a few hours - was no coincidence (there, i said the 'c' word).

The co-incidence (that hyphen makes ALL the difference, by the way) of the two events brought into sharp relief the parallelisms between the two.

Both come from historical trajectories of strong, rich, cultures - Citroën and Disney: now _there's_ something to get the creative juices flowing. Both acknowledge - to varying degrees - their respective cultural trajectories; while at the same time being unashamed reinterpretations (not reboots, the way Star Trek (2009) was) to inspire the next generation of participatory engagements. Both have the potential - though in one it is extremely latent - to provoke their participants into exploring wider questions beyond the immediate.

Both exploit glowing light-streams to full visual effect; and let's not forget which country Daft Punk hail from :-)

But is that all there is? Is there a there, there?

There is one final piece of the puzzle, and it was presented - in God's perfect timing - just before midnight, just before i went to bed.

As you may know, the Citroën DS3 is BBC Top Gear's Car of the Year for 2010.

As is my habit, i check Top Gear's website a couple of times a day to keep myself abreast of developments in the motoring industry.

When the page loaded last night, it referenced a video-interview that Top Gear Editor-at-large Jason Barlow (himself a big Citroën fan) conducted with key individuals in the Tron: Legacy team.

It's a short, six-minute, clip, so you can easily watch it for yourself.

At two minutes into the clip, Jeff Bridges shares "the favourite car he ever had".

Considering the context of this essay - you'll get no prizes for guessing what it was.

But then, Jeff does something more than just say the name "Citroën DS21".

Watch him - his right hand goes up… first at the wrist, then at the finger-tips.

Hear him - he emits a hiss from his lips.

It is unmistakeable - Jeff is describing an embodied - epiphanic - experience with a car.

You think those updated light-cycles in Tron: Legacy are incredible?

Wait till you try a hydropneumatically-suspended Citroën.

Co-presence, dimensionality, identity-formation - introducing the Interpretive Camera

revisiting dimensionality and co-presence - this blog post needs to be read in conjunction with this one, and with this one too.

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for the first time that i can remember, i participated in a video-Skype-conference-call yesterday.

i have participated on many occasions in voice-enabled conference-calls in Second Life (SL), and i had thought the experience would be similar.

it was not.

i have been wondering why.

one obvious difference would be that the experience lacked dimensionality.

but how did the experience fare in terms of co-presence? surely a video-conference would afford a sense of co-presence?

we need to think carefully about what we mean by co-presence.

for someone who's never before participated in an activity in SL (not necessarily a voice-chat, or even a text-chat, but any kind of collaborative activity with someone else), it's easy to think that video-conferencing affords co-presence.

yet to me, the experience of the two was vastly different. why was this so?

first, synchronous-activity is not the same as co-presence - at least, not co-presence as it truly can be with publicly-accessible technologies such as virtual worlds and fictive environments.

second, i need to introduce the concept of (for-want-of-a-better-word-i-shall-call-it) the Interpretive Camera.

the Interpretive Camera, as i conceptualise it, is a primary lens through which one seeks to understand oneself through what-one-understands-as the eyes of one's audience (of one, or of many). note, it is not the lens which the audience uses in interacting with oneself, but the lens which oneself uses in an effort to understand how oneself is being understood by one's audience (hence, 'interpretive').

the greater one's intersubjectivity (Husserl, et al) with one's communicative other, the sharper the focus of the Interpretive Camera.

(as an aside, this conceptualisation of the Interpretive Camera is akin to, but not identical with, the use of the term in film-making, such as by van Dyke (1946) in Hollywood Quarterly, and by Proferes (2008))

as i conceptualise it, for any given interaction, the Interpretive Camera can take several different positions, vis-a-vis one's Real-World Identities (Gee, 2007). For example, in Gee's work on videogames, and, (by extension, at least for this particular discussion) virtual environments and fictive worlds, one could say that Gee's notion of Projective Identity aligns well with the Interpretive Camera being 'behind and slightly above one's physical / biological head'. in this framing, what the Self sees through the Interpretive Camera is an amalgam of the biological entity with the avataric identity as the Projective Identity.

to take another example, during metacognition (not the same as reflecting upon an event), the Interpretive Camera is within the Self - it can only be so, if metacognition is truly 'meta'.

now let's start tying together these various strands.

i would argue that an environment only affords a high-degree of co-presence when each interactant's Interpretive Camera is positioned such that they have a common actionspace (here, i make the distinction between actionspace and field-of-view). this is what environments / worlds such as SL and WoW do very well - and what films such as Inception depict, because not only do they nurture individual Projective Identities, but they also allow synchronous interactants to understand and interpret their respective Projective Identities vis-a-vis their impacts on, and the actions of, others.

i would say that the preceding two sentences are the most critical in this entire post.

so far, we've talked about two possible positions for the interpretive-camera, but there is a third.

i was in my bedroom when i took the Skype video-conference call yesterday. when the party on the other side asked to make a video-connection, without a second thought i clicked the 'video' button on the Skype interface. since i had no prior embodied experience of a video-conference call, the action was reflexive in as much as i took it to be analogous to simply engaging 'voice' in a conversation in SL.

but to my surprise it wasn't the same, because i suddenly saw myself in the small window, and one of the first questions i was asked by a member of the other party was "is that your bedroom? there are so many books!". i saw myself (rather than my well-dressed avatar) - on my own screen, and realised that this same image would be projected on a larger screen to my audience - in my (thankfully decent) pyjamas.

further, as the conversation progressed, i found myself wondering about (and therefore distracted by) where i should be looking. to anyone who's met me 'in Real Life', you'll know that when i'm listening intently i tend to look down. this is because i am trying to cant my head such that my ear is nearest to you, rather than my eyes. i found myself doing the same thing yesterday (even though, because i was wearing a headset, i had no need to), and caught myself from time to time, and when i did i made a conscious effort to give 'eye-contact', but then ran into the metacognitive problem of where exactly the interactants' 'eyes' were - do i look at my Mac's camera? or do i look at the Skype window on my screen (which was, of course, the more 'natural', rather than staring at the cold green light of the iSight camera).

now, consider where the Interpretive Camera is, during such video-conference calls. i would posit that it is in a third position - not behind-and-slightly-above one's head, neither within oneself, but in front of one's face, turned upon oneself.

this latter three-word phrase 'turned upon oneself' is a short one, but don't overlook it. for in this phrase lies the key reason why (as i put it fourteen paragraphs earlier) "synchronous-activity is not the same as co-presence".

to understand why not, one needs to return to what i termed the most critical sentence in this post, namely that "an environment only affords a high-degree of co-presence when each interactant's Interpretive Camera is positioned such that they have a common actionspace. this is what environments / worlds such as SL and WoW do very well... because they allow synchronous interactants to understand and interpret their respective Projective Identities vis-a-vis their impacts on, and the actions of, others."

to get to the point, video-conferencing does not afford co-presence (and therefore is a weak tool if co-presence, shared meaning and identity-formation is a priority for any given meeting). in fact, i would go almost as far as to say it actively acts against co-presence (while ironically looking as if it serves co-presence very well, through the guise of synchronous-activity) because of the diametrically-opposed focal points of each interactant's respective Interpretive Cameras.

that is, instead of each interactant's respective Interpretive Cameras focusing on a common - dimensional - actionspace, each Camera is instead reversed (both in position as well as in focal point) towards the physical / biological interactant. Thus, there is no opportunity for a Projective Identity to form, because the position and focal point of the Interpretive Cameras have been reversed (that is, they 'look out of the circle' rather than 'look in to the roasting marshmallows on the campfire'.

thank you for reading this far :-)

book review: A Practical Guide to Using Second Life in Higher Education

the one hundred and eighty-seventh episode of ventriloquy introduces Maggi Savin-Baden's A Practical Guide to Using Second Life in Higher Education .

in 224 concise pages, Dr Savin-Baden successfully takes the reader through an introduction to the affordances of Second Life for learning, through to a discussion on how to conceptualise assessment in Second Life, and ends with some considerations of Design-Based Research and ethnographic study. Along the way, the journey is liberally sprinkled with practical tips and informed anecdotes about the more mundane outworkings of day-to-day lived practice in-world.

please do join me in this 2.2 MB download :-)

THANK YOU for nominating the blog 'voyeurism' for 'Best Educational Use of a Virtual World' for Edublog Awards 2010 :-)

i do not know who it was who has so kindly nominated this blog voyeurism in the category 'Best Educational Use of a Virtual World' for this year's Edublog Awards, but a huge THANK YOU, all the same!

thank you so much for the encouragement.

:-)

i'd like also to take the opportunity to invite you to consider voting for Kwan Tuck Soon's nomination as 'Best Individual Tweeter' - i've had opportunities to engage him in conversation and i've always come away impressed with how he 'groks' many of the key issues.

with God's grace, we will continue to do what i can to work with the wider community to advance the discourse in this exciting field :-)