While at my little cousin's birthday party the other day, we were presented with an opportunity to play Karaoki Revolution for Playstation or some similar name. The user wore a headset and selected a character, name, and outfit and got on the virtual stage on screen. Then you sang-a-long with the tune and a motion captured crowd, which cheered you on or got mad depending on the machine's judgement.



Terry sang "Billy Jean" and I sang "Girl's Just Want To Have Fun." The machine picked them for us. My cousin, her husband, my brother, Terry and I sang three rounds in a competition and the machine validated our performance.

The whole time I was thinking about how weird it is that we found this activity to be totally normal yet I cannot imagine the situation with the machine. I can't imagine sitting around taking turns singing and voting on who is better at it. By the way Christina is the best, by far. She is a karaoke diva.

QUESTIONS:
So what about the machine makes the activity so normal and accepted? Is this the situaion for many other activities? Does the addition of a machine make it seem somehow logical and thus acceptable? Is it perhaps that we are slowly being conditioned to accept the machine as source of authority? Have we been convinced by Sony/Konami that its more fun with a machine, so that we can buy their products? Does anyone have any ideas about this?

Z-Brush is the collest program I have ever used. It is a hybrid painting/3D modeling package that allows you to bring in obj geometry and turn it into a deformable mesh brush. Kind of like the mesh burhses from Maya PFX but with the contorl of Adobe Photoshop. Once the Mesh is in Z-Brush you can use varios tools to deform it and then export the geometery back into .obj or render it. For this case I exporte dthe geometry to an .obj file. Opened it in C4D, reduced the triangles by about 86%, put the remaining geometry into a hyperNURBS object and rendered using some shadowed lighting and the bhondoniNut Cheen shader.

I added some bones and some soft Ik and was able to re-pose the geometry to look like two object walking or one object stalking the other.

This nerve is the first nerve for Chris Outlaw's Brain VR project. I thought I would post both the poly verison and the render for the two groups of people that would care (real-timers vs renderers). I will making some more and then reducing the geomtery. Currently it is 405 polygons.

Its kind of hard to imagine them without seeing them in his project. So we will have to see. The project involves the viewer being present in the brain of a riot police man during a protest march. You watch through his eyes and then judge, using the facts and feelings you are presented with. When speaking with him on the way to the Trinh Minh-Ha screening yesterday,, he said it was an experiemnt of mixing documentary and VR.

I hope he likes the nerve. I have a feeling it would look nice if it had a pulsing light texture.

Here are the rendered verisons of the masks and their geometry for the VR project that I am modeling for. som eof you might have already seen them on the DMA 390 site but I thought I would add them here for the record.

Since these models were created Josphine had me change t hem a bit - they look more like China Dolls now but I like them like this so for now you can see this version.

This is going to be underdeveloped but I will finish it at some point later today when I have time. I have thought about it for a while but only have five minutes before I leave for school.

The lower to middle middle class download music. Belonging to that income range, many of the people I know download music of the internet with some sort of P2P program like Kazaa or ?.

It is noteworthy that it puts them in a specific class I believe, directly in the middle of the class spectrum. They are the people that are wealthy enough to have a sohpisticated computer system and broadband internet connection but not so wealthy that buying retail priced CDs in mass quantity is no problem. It seems that the upward limit of the music downloading scheme are probably people in the upper middle and wealthy classes. At that point you are able to just buy CDs without monetary impact, so downloading music might not be worth the time.