The End of Semester Grind
With Thanksgiving break coming up in two weeks, another semester is very quickly coming to an end. The SIF program is running in full gear to bring these projects to a good stopping point.
CMII Grand Opening
The SIF program was granted the honor of being able to join the Data Visualization room at the CMII Grand Opening on October 19th. Various companies as well as Georgia State University’s very own, President Becker, were present to explore the facility and many university organizations’ work. We brought our two desktops and two Oculus Rifts via a cart through the streets of Atlanta and after an extremely bumpy trek, we were able to set them up with our two VR projects, 3D Atlanta (http://sites.gsu.edu/innovation/2016/04/06/3d-atlanta/) and Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern (http://unpackingmanuels.com/). Super proud to display our hard work, we were glad many people were interested in hearing and experiencing the projects we’ve put so much into. Alongside those projects, we also demoed ATLMaps (https://atlmaps.org/) and displayed a mural stitched by various former and current SIFs. We had an estimated 200 people stop by to check out our projects and both undergraduate and graduate SIFs alike, were moving at top pace to talk to everyone and show our projects! To read more about it, visit http://news.gsu.edu/2017/10/23/creative-media-industries-institute-opens/ or even watch a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD_XKb8wcMk!
Hoccleve Archive
“I believe it should be quite an easy task” are words challenged by AWS S3. Unfortunately, I’ve run into various issues since starting on this task. Thanks to fellow SIF, Jack Le, we fixed an error that I worked a couple days on in a couple moments! However, there still are a lot of small errors and some of it is slowed down due to my unfamiliarity with S3 and AWS. To combat that, I’ve been reading a lot on StackOverflow and feel like I’ve powered up since! It’s still running a few bugs being unable to correctly pull the XML files, but fingers crossed for having it up very soon!
Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern
I have finally learned how to bake! Fellow SIF and project manager of this, Jack Le, graciously taught me how to bake textures the other week and I am still working with him on the process of writing up a correct workflow for our fellow project members and being able to put it up on Omeka for the public to see our models individually as well as in the Manuel’s Tavern environment. I am also still working on modeling more frames so we’ll have more to demo. Many of the visitors who explored our project tried going up the stairs of the Tavern or in different rooms, but it’s still a work in progress! I would like to get a lot more done so they can walk into different rooms and have more fun and read more of the projects we’ve linked to each model! Our guest Ph.D. student, Kateland Wolfe, has been making progress in her work as well! Fellow SIF, Kristi Ford has been working hard on the gigapans with Saif Ali, and as a result, hasn’t been working on frames, but they’re almost done so good luck to them – the end is near! Good luck to all other fellow SIFs on this project as well to finishing their walls before the semester ends!
ATL Maps
The ATL Maps content team have been working hard at adding new content that aligns with their interests and incorporating them into the current data sets and maps. We are reaching a stopping point in which we submit all our data, sett them as a working status, and have our project leader, Ashley McNeil, put them up on the site! As a result, please look forward to a lot of new content on ATL Maps soon! As for the development side, I have put the slider on a temporary hold just because the priority hasn’t been as high as the other projects that have been keeping me busy, but I definitely would love to finish the slider by the middle of the next semester.
Homeless Resources
The Homeless Resources project had a slow start, but we’re going! We have split the team into two teams: the back-end team and the front-end/content team. The back-end team consists of Lee Klarich and Tabias Clements. The front-end/content team will be the rest of the team: Sydney Mathis Adams, Maximillian Naza, our project leader, George Greenridge, and I. This project was initiated by Dr. LaValla Joyce Wilson, who has been meeting with us frequently to discuss her vision of this website, currently coined the “Dream Machine.” The SIF team has been working hard to produce a rough skeleton of this website so we can show it to her and go from there to tweak the specific works. So far, Lee Klarich has completed a very rough sketch of the website’s design as well as choose the color palette. He has passed it onto Sydney Mathis Adams who will now be working on turning that into a digital product so we can make sure the colors and such work right and the UX is only the best. In these next two weeks, I’ll start looking into articles or even writing articles about how to apply to college, filling out FAFSA, and other financial aid resources that may help in the process. We are planning on making a whole quick-link page of these so it is easy to access and read these articles to get the information they need. We are all drafting logos and looking forward to meeting in a couple weeks to discuss the next step before the end of the semester comes.
Have a great holiday season, and stay warm!