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Hole in History

  December 7, 2014 , , , , , ,

As you all may know, I am a part of a team of awesome SIFs who are working on an educational, innovative project. The project is aimed towards recreating an interactive virtual 3D model of the intersection of Decatur St. and Ivy St. (now Peachtree Center Ave.) in what it would have been like in the 1930s. Working on this project for the last semester has shed light in the fact that the project has taken a lot more time and energy than expected, while also hitting several bumps on the road. To me, that’s no problem as I know that all great masterpieces (not implying that our project will live up to the word “masterpiece”) take hard work, time, and dedication. Currently we have been at a standstill with the project because of one fact: there is a lack of pictures of the street during the 1930s. In order to resolve our problem, My job for the project was to search the internet inside and out for any pictures of buildings, preferably head-on shots, that would aid in recreating the building in a virtual 3D model as accurately as possible. Another SIF was setting up the 3D world in the game engine called Unity. As the search continued and the results were very disheartening and minimal, we decided to look to outside sources for help. One of our project supervisors heard that Emory was attempting to recreate the city of Atlanta into virtual 3D model in a similar project. … Continue reading

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Collaboration in Action

  December 7, 2014 , ,

Earlier this semester , Georgia State Anthropology hosted a visit from Dr. Dominique Rissolo. Dr. Rissolo is an accomplished researcher and is currently a program director at the Waitt Institute and is also involved with the Center for Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA 3). Dr. Rissolo was catching up with long time friend and GSU Faculty Dr. Jeffrey Glover, as well as presenting talks on Grant Writing as well as a National Geographic Institute research program at a Cenote in Quintana Roo known as Hoyo Negro or the Black Hole. He was also checking in as committee member on my thesis research as well as a GSU colleague of mine. Dr. Rissolo conducted his Dissertation research in the region of Quintana Roo where I am doing research for my thesis. We decided to catch up on thesis research at CURVE, as the venue proved ideal for looking at the kinds of data archaeologists deal with. Andrew

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Look at all the Lights

  December 7, 2014 ,

Well it has been a great week here at the Exchange after a month hiatus in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Most of my week has been spent fine tuning the details of the Vacufuge safety video in Captivate 8.  Yep! You heard right! We have switched from Captivate 7 to Captivate 8.  And to boot I have transitioned from using a PC to a Mac.  All of this has culminated in quite the learning curve on how to navigate and to manipulate items in Captivate. And without a proper instructional video on how to use new items like the Drag and Drop interaction on a Mac, most of my time has been spent on poking around, using trial and error to find out why my interaction was not responding in the same ways as the PC version. However, after several hours and sheer persistence, I am happy to say we have it working the way we wanted it to!! Learning to customize Drag and Drop Interactions in Captivate 8 on a Mac Key take aways from the experience include: Captivate 8 tool windows are hidden until manually turned on for a Mac. In order to only have one correct answer for a Drag and Drop Interaction, you have to click on the Drop Location, click on the Format tab, click on the Object Actions… button, and then select the appropriate Drag Source Type on a Mac — not intuitive or parallel to a PC.  When you preview the file th Drag items … Continue reading

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Innovating by Hand

  December 7, 2014 ,

All of the text above was imported in, which is why I couldn’t hyperlink Touchnote. This is the only bit I’ve typed, save the title. As you can see, the pen has several issues, not least that it buzzes quite loudly. For some reason, the receiver picked up my ‘smooth’ lines as dashed and dotted above (perhaps it was my large sleeve), and this blog entry took me 3-4 times longer than a regular entry usually does. Perhaps I can tell I’m innovating when it takes a long time, but feels like play… maybe. Valerie  

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Interactive Video

  November 23, 2014 ,

Hello fellow SIFers, I know people have been wondering for a way to make videos more…fun? Yeah that’s the word. Because I don’t think many people want to sit through a video of someone talking about an event or idea. You also don’t want to make more work that is overtly complicated. Sooooo I found a library that deals exactly with that. It’s called p5JS. It pretty much gives users the power to interact with video. You can view an example of it here. p5JS is a spin off from Processing, which deals with accessing artists, coders, and other visual-relation fields together. It’s a broader scope than just dealing with interaction such as quizzes or tests. It encompasses a whole new idea of digital literacy by imploring the user to learn from mistakes and practice on skills they already learned in class. So basically, it’s sort of returning to us 90s kids generation of primary learning. Video shows like Dora, or Sesame Street, or Blues Clues where learning through video meant waiting for user to make a suggested input and practice on that input throughout time with repetition. I guess that method of learning through video got lost somewhere between elementary and middle school, but hey we can always do it with the next generation of kids. On a related note, P5JS and Processing are both part of a wider gain of web technologies focusing on creating new ways for people to express things in the browser: HTML5. I’ll talk about … Continue reading