Fallingwater at Seanchai, Kitely (Image idea borrowed from Shandon Loring!)
As I’ve recently posted, in June I donated my Fallingater build on Kitely to the folk at Seanchai Library to become a part of their new home world on that grid, and I’ve been working to overhaul and upgrade it since then.
The work on the place is now more-or-less complete, with just a few nips and tucks remaining, and the folk at Seanchai are now ready to open the doors to Fallingwater’s first official engagement as a storytelling venue.
So, on Saturday August 30th, at 09:00 PDT (SLT), Shandon Loring from the Seanchai team will be presenting Out Of Time, Tales of Time Travel, described as:
Individuals rewriting their own pasts. Brave souls safeguarding the world today from yesterday. Fools tampering with Einstein’s laws of physics. Stories exploring the wonders and perils of time travel, and humanity at its best and worst.
Anyone with an interest in storytelling in voice, and all the traditions which stand therein, and / or who wish to hear engrossing tales from Second Life’s and Kitely’s premier group of storytellers, are welcome to drop by the Seanchai Library’s Kitely home world and Fallingwater.
August 5th marked the 2nd anniversary on Curiosity’s landing on Mars. The “landiversary”, as NASA dubbed the occasion, passed in something of a subdued manner in many respects, featuring a re-run of the August 2012 video reviewing the MSL’s arrival on Mars. Reviews of the mission from the perspective of two years on from that remarkable lading didn’t start-up until the days after the anniversary, with videos and lectures from members of the mission team.
One of the films which did appear, directly out of Caltech, rather than NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which is located on Caltech’s Pasadena, California, campus), is Our Curiosity, a 6-minute celebration of Curiosity’s mission, and humanity’s drive to explore, to seek, to learn, and to understand, narrated by Felicia Day and the superb Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
August 5th also marked my last MSL report, when Curiosity was some 3 kilometres from the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”, the huge mound at the centre of Gale Crater, and the rover’s primary target for exploration. At that time, the rover had started to cross a region of chaotic terrain, marked by a rocky plateau cut by a series of sandy-bottomed valleys. The plateau itself proved to be littered with sharp-edges rocks and stones which had already caused some increase in the wear and tear being suffered by the rover’s wheels – albeit not as much as mission engineers had feared – by the time Curiosity had reached the edge of the nearest of the shallow valleys, which had been dubbed “Hidden Valley”.
The plan had been to use the valleys, where the sand would be less wearing on the rover’s aluminium wheels, to reach an exposed area of bedrook designated the “Pahrump Hills”, where Curiosity would engage in further rock sampling work prior to it continuing on to the “Murray Buttes”, the entry point for its ascent up the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”.
However, rather than drive the one-tonne rover straight through the middle of the valley, where there are numerous dunes of potentially soft, wind-blown sand which might cause some difficulty traversing, the idea had been for Curiosity to skirt along the edge of the valley, where it was hoped the sand would be firmer and make for a better driving surface. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case; as the rover proceeded along “Hidden Valley” it exhibited far more signs of wheel slippage than had been anticipated, giving rise to fears that it might get bogged-down in the sand were it to continue.
The sands of Mars: an image from Curiosity’s black and white Navcam system captured on August 4th, showing the loose sands the rover was traversing as it continued into “Hidden Valley” (click for full size)
As a result, the rover reversed course, driving back out of the valley. In doing so, it crossed the rocky “ramp” it had used to originally enter the valley, and one of its wheels cracked the slab-like rock’s surface, revealing bright material within, possibly from mineral veins. The rock, dubbed “Bonanza King” showed similar signs of origin as “Pahrump Hills”, so a decision was made to examine it as a possible substitute drilling site.
“Geologically speaking, we can tie the Bonanza King rocks to those at “Pahrump Hills”. Studying them here will give us a head start in understanding how they fit into the bigger picture of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp,” said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, before continuing, “This rock has an appearance quite different from the sandstones we’ve been driving through for several months. The landscape is changing, and that’s worth checking out.”
Precisely what Mr. Parisi’s position at HiFi is, isn’t stated, but Mr. Rosedale does say:
Tony has just joined us as an advisor, and is also working with us on some secret High Fidelity stuff that is coming soon. He’s a perfect person to add to the High Fidelity team.
Tony Parisi (via SVVR)
Tony Parisi is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and a 3D technology innovator. He’s a career CTO / software architect and entrepreneur, has and is serving on a number working groups, and may also be familiar to some as one of the SVVR Creating the VR Metaverse panel in April 2014. More recently, he was featured in a Drax Files Radio Hour feature-length interview, which I also reviewed (and am embedding again at the end of this piece, as it really is worth listening to if you missed it the first time around).
Tony’s full bio can be found here, and while the work he’ll be doing at HiFi is currently “secret”, Philip Rosedale does expand on why his involvement is a good fit for the company:
What we are building at High Fidelity is a bigger project than any one designer or company. To bring virtual reality to everyone will mean a broad set of standards and open systems, and Tony has been designing and championing big pieces of those standards for his whole career, most recently with WebGL.
There can be no doubting Tony’s background and understanding of the potential for consumer-focused VR – again, just listen to the interview below for proof of that.
So interesting times at High Fidelity just got more interesting!
(Nice touch on the updated website as well, with the video header.)
The folks at High Fidelity has been blogging a lot lately. I covered recent moves with improvements to the avatar facial expressions and synch the mouth / lips to better reflect their movements as we speak (and sing!), and one of the more recent blog posts is something of a follow-up to this, with members of the Hi Fi team having a little fun. It’s fair to say that if they keep things up, Emily and Ozan and (I think that’s) Andrew on backing vocals could find themselves in-demand for gigs virtual and otherwise!
Anyway, we’ll get to that in a moment.
The other two posts are focused on Philip’s favourite subject: reducing latency, particularly where sound is concerned. As the oldest of the posts Measuring the Speed of Sound, from August 13th, reducing latency is something of an obsession at High Fidelity, and the post talks about various experiments in trying to reduce audio latency. I’m still not convinced on Philip’s big downer on voice communications over mobile devices, where he’s in the past referred to the 500 msec delay as a “barrier” to communications; I’ve yet to find it silting conversations.
That said, I can see his point in ensuring that audio and video remain synched when it comes to direct interaction, particularly given the nature of what High Fidelity are trying to achieve with the likes of facial and gesture capture to achieve a greater sense of presence. Within the post, Philip discusses the most recent work HiFi have been carrying out in comparing various mediums and how they handle audio and audio latency.
Paloma’s Javascript Project touches on the work of 17-year-old Paloma Palmer. A high school student, Paloma has been honing her JavaScript skills during the summer vacation as an intern at High Fidelity. Video interviewed by HiFi’s Chris Collins, she describes her project in coding voxels to respond directly to volume inputs over a microphone in real-time, coding a form of graphic equaliser in voxel cubes which responds, with minimal delay, directly to both her and Chris’ voices and intonations as they speak – a further demonstration of the low latency goal HiFi are aiming towards, and one which, as the blog post notes, “opens up a bunch of new creative content areas for the virtual world”.
HiFi’s Chris Collins talks with Paloma Palmer, the 17-year-old intern who has been working at HiFi through her summer vacation (inset)
However, it is with High Fidelity’s AKA covers Easy, which sits sandwiched between Measuring and Paloma which offers the most fun, as well as demonstrating some intriguing elements of HiFi’s capabilities.
The post actually takes the form of another music video (and embedded below) in which Emily, with Ozan on guitar and I think (and I see Ciaran Laval is of the same mindset as me) Andrew Meadows (himself aka – or at least previously aka – Andrew Linden) providing the backing vocals. Together they’ve formed HiFi’s own band, AKA (as in Also Known As), a name chosen because, as Emily explains, it allows them to be anyone they want to be. Chris Collins and Ryan Karpf are also on hand, although they don’t participate in the song.
The video this time is a cover of the Commodore’s Easy. We’re promised a deeper explanation of some of the technicalities behind it from “Executive Producer” Ryan at a later date. What is great about the video is that it is totally informal (witness the start, and keep running right until the end when you watch it).
The video is worth watching for the way Emily’s avatar clearly reflects her emotional response to the lyrics, and for the way Ozan’s avatar appears to be playing his guitar, rather than simply strumming it one-handed, as we’re perhaps used to seeing with avatars; his response to the music is also clear. I assume this has been done by some form of motion capture via whatever camera system he is using, but we’ll have to wait for Ryan’s follow-up to know more.
There are other great delights in the video – Andrew’s surfacing from the pond waters to give the backing “ahs” had me snorting coffee; they are delightfully surreal. I have to say that Chris Collin’s avatar looks somewhat blissed out (aka a little stoned – no offence, Chris!), an impression heightened with the cutaway to Emily’s look on his comment about feeling very cool and relaxed prior to the song starting!
All told, the video is an absolute delight, and also reveals some interesting little elements within HiFi (witness Ryan’s enthusiastic hand-clapping at the end).
One of the things people have critiqued High Fidelity about is the look of their avatars. Yes, they can use 3D cameras to capture a user’s facial expression and translated them into facial movements on an avatar but, well, the avatars just look a little odd.
Or at least, that’s an oft-heard or read comment. I’m not entirely in disagreement; SL avatars may not be technically up-to-snuff in many ways, but they can look good, and over they years, they have spoiled us somewhat.
However, High Fidelity is still only in an alpha phase; and things are bound to improve over time with the look and feel of their environments and their avatars. As a demonstration of their attempts to improve things, the HiFi team have recently released a couple of videos and a blog post from their animator, Ozan Serim, formerly of Pixar Studios.
In the post – which marks his first time writing for the blog, Ozan explains how he’s trying to bring more advanced animation to the platform’s avatars to, as he puts it, “make live avatars look really amazing – as close to what we see in animated films today.” This isn’t as easy at it sounds, as he goes on to note:
This is a big challenge – we have to do everything in a fraction of a second without the benefits of an animator (like me!) being able to ‘post-process’ the results of what is motion captured. So I’ve been working on the ‘rigging’: how a live 3D camera and a motion capture package like Faceshift is able to ‘puppeteer’ an avatar. With less accurate data, we have to be clever about things like how we move the mouth to more simplistically capture the phonemes that make up speech.
To demonstrate the result, Ozan includes a video of Emily Donald, one of the other HiFi staff members, singing Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful. While Emily’s avatar might still look somewhat cartoonish, what is interesting to note is the way her mouth moves, and how the emotional content of the lyrics are captured in very subtle facial movements. Ozan notes himself that things are a little simplistic and there is more work to do – but even so, this early experiment shows much promise.
As well as this video, using the “default” format of HiFi avatar, Ozan and members of the HiFi team have been working on improving the overall look of their avatar, and some early results of their efforts can be seen in another music video released at the start of August, and which is linked-to in the blog post.
This is again experiment in rigging facial expressions to more fully match those of a human being, with special attention being paid to the “A”s and “M”s as the avatar (Ozan) lip-synchs to Freddie Mercury singing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. This is another video where it’s worth watching the avatar’s mouth movements – and also eye and eyebrow movements, which also reflect a strong level of emotion.
Again, there’s a fair way to go here, but these early results are fascinating, and not just for the technical aspects of what is being done here: capturing, processing and rigging subtle facial expressions in real-time. As a commentator on the Bohemian Rhapsody notes, “cool but creepy” – a reflection of the fact that HiFi have taken a further step into the Uncanny Valley. It’s going to be interesting to see how well they fare in crossing it.
August 5th 2014 marked the second anniversary of Curiosity’s remarkable arrival on Mars, in what was dubbed by members of the mission team as the “seven minutes of terror”.
It was one of the most anticipated touch-downs of a remote vehicle on another planet in history, and was followed minute-by-minute the world over via the Internet, with people watching NASA TV, following events on Twitter and even witnessing them in “real-time” through the unique focus of NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System simulator website (you can still replay the landing on the simulator).
Since then, Curiosity has done much, including meeting its primary science goal to find evidence of environments which may once have been suitable for the nurturing of microbial life (Curiosity isn’t able to detect any evidence of microbial life, past or present itself as it has no direct means to identify organic compounds or minerals, that will be the role of the next rover mission, scheduled for 2020 – see later in this article).
Most recently, the rover has been approaching its main exploratory goal, the large mound at the centre of Gale Crater which has been dubbed “Mount Sharp” by NASA, having been “on the road” for almost a year, driving steadily south, with the occasional stop-over at various scientific points of interest.
Since my last MSL update, Curiosity has achieved another mission mile stone and another mission first. On June 27th, the day of my last update, the rover trundled over the boundary line of its 3-sigma landing ellipse. Then on July 12th, it captured new images of its onboard laser firing.
As to the first of these events, I’ll let Guy Webster of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explain.
“You must be wondering, ‘What the heck is a 3-sigma landing ellipse?’ It is a statistical prediction made prior to landing to determine how far from a targeted centre point the rover might land, given uncertainties such as the atmospheric conditions on landing day. The ‘3-sigma’ part means three standard deviations, so the rover was very, very likely (to about the 99.9-percent level) to land somewhere inside this ellipse. Such 3-sigma ellipses get a lot of scrutiny during landing-site selection because we don’t want anything dangerous for a landing – such as boulders of cliffs – inside the ellipse.”
In Curiosity’s case, the 3-sigma ellipse marked a relatively flat area on the floor of Gale Crater some 7 x 20 kilometres (4 x 12 miles) in size which was as close to the slopes of “Mount Sharp” as mission planners dare to bring the rover in for landing without risking it coming down in either chaotic terrain or on a slope where it might slide or topple over as the Skycrane set it down. The landing zone was also relatively close to the areas of geological interest which became known as “Glenelg” and “Yellowknife Bay”, and which the rover spent a good part of a year exploring – achieving its primary science goal in the process.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was overhead at the time the rover crossed this imaginary line in the sands of Mars, and captured the moment using its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.
Caught in its tracks: NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographs Curiosity as the rover crosses the boundary (marked by the blue line) of its original landing ellipse (click any image in this article for full size)
Sol 687 (July 12th, 2014 PDT) was the day on which the rover captured images of its laser firing on a rock dubbed “Nova”.
The laser, which is a part of the ChemCam system on mounted on the rover’s mast, is used to vaporise minute amounts of material on target rocks. Light from the resultant plasma is captured by ChemCam’s telescope for spectrographic analysis.
In all, the laser has been fired over 150,000 times in the two years since Curiosity arrived on Mars, and the results of firings have been seen in many “before and after” shots of rocks on the receiving end of a laser burst. What made this event special was that the burst firing at “Nova” was captured by the rover’s turret-mounted Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). This allowed NASA to produce a film showing the moment of impact of the laser shots.
In the first part of the film, the initial “spark” of a single laser pulse can be seen striking the surface of “Nova”. This is followed by an enhanced set of images showing the laser firing at 10 times a second, disrupting dust and minerals on the rock as the plasma cloud erupts.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 