Category Archives: innovation

No comments

I hope you had the time of your life….a reflection on SIF

  April 20, 2015 , , , ,

As finals week quickly approaches, we are working at full capacity to bring projects to a space of completion.  And while the thought of the end of the semester brings along with the quintessential dialogue of, “…gosh…where did the time go?” Indeed, where did it go? It went into projects, big and small, that have brought new resources and information to the Georgia State community. Each click of the mouse bringing us closer and closer to the creation of a tool or resource which did not previously exist.  Through this post, I’d like to take a moment to look back and summarize the SIF experience. What you all have hopefully learned from me:  1) Maps have power  Maps, even within the current communication age which we are living in, still remain undervalued and misunderstood.  Maps gain our trust just by the mere act of being maps. They have the power to explain the world in ways that words do not. As I was told during a recent interview for my own thesis project, ” If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a million.” The ways we are making maps in changing. We should be critical of maps and understand the different viewpoints from which they are created 2) How to make your own maps  Throughout the blog post I have been able to offer a number of step by step guides to supply readers with some starting points to Google Earth  work and tools like Batch Geo. Additionally, over the year … Continue reading

1 Comment

Undergrad Innovation

  March 22, 2015 , , ,

This week I was asked a question when coming up with elements for a project proposal for 3D Atlanta along with Krisna, Alex, Robert, and Dylan: “What has the 3D Atlanta project done for your undergraduate experience?” And while I tried to keep it short (not really) for the proposal, I realized just what this question was asking me. You see, I tend to think of my progress in certain year frames. In 11th grade, I started learning Photoshop and basic design principles of drawing and illustrating. By 12th grade, I had a good knowledge of html. By last year, I had good knowledge of css and started working on Javascript stuff, as well as had a great knowledge of Python through my 2310 class. And now this year is all about execution and applying what I know, especially within 3D modal contexts for the 3D Atlanta project. I find myself looking back and realizing how fast and far everything went. It seems like an exponential curve of innovation. I went from making boxes move on a screen to dealing with dynamic layers of interactive material. And now, thanks to 3D Atlanta and my math classes, I’m starting to look into stuff I thought I wouldn’t touch until the end of days as a college student. Things like projection matrices, raytracing, and other 3D concepts. I find myself reading papers from Disney research in zurich about complicated algorithms and equations that I can start to understand now. For pete’s sake, … Continue reading

No comments

Defining Innovation with Fun and Creepiness

  February 14, 2015

This week I’ve been working at outlining a paper exploring the definition of innovation, and how I am applying that to the DALN booth at the upcoming CCCC’s conference in Tampa Florida. What that means, is that I’ve spent even more time than usual researching this illusive word – chasing it down like the Hobbit to my Ring-Wraith. I’ve read that Everett Rogers defines innovation as ““an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or another unit of adoption” (2003), which gets at the idea that ‘innovation’ has very much to do with audience perception. Erin Frost, in a journal called Computers and Composition writes about student innovation as “the key to the development and vitality of technology” as users. Yet Frost never actually defines ‘innovation’ for her audience. This is not unusual. This same week, I a friend on Facebook shared out an article that was so entertaining, I cried a little laughing at it: The Creepiest Things You Can Do on Faceboook The author leads us through a photo narrative about how she ‘messes’ with some friends for her own amusement. Some might call this ‘hacking’ Facebook = using an application for something other than its intended use. To me, this is innovation. Interestingly though, Ashley Feinberg, the author of the article above, does not define her work as innovative, but it is. It MUST be. I say this because she is finding a new way to get people to laugh. She is finding a new way … Continue reading

3 Comments

The Creeping Up Problem of Innovation

  February 14, 2015

Hey guys!   We’re in the middle of February, but its still the new year! So…yeah…Happy New Year… To business! Lots of stuff happening around CURVE. I’ve been dropping in on a few consultations to see what’s going on around the University and it seems that a lot of business majors are coming in talking about big data analytics, which is cool since we have loads of people in that department. Other than that though, there seems to be a good amount of people in there working on school projects and whatnot, myself included. I’m working on a math project right now dealing with audio algorithms and music, so looking forward to that in another blog post. Anyways, the topic I want to talk about in this blog post is about…well getting ideas for projects in the first place. Yes, yes…most of us at CURVE get ecstatic about working on another project when we have 5 already under our belt, but it pays to keep an open mind. I found this  website by Harvard University dealing with annotating, digital literacy, and multimedia. The website has a lot of different ways to enhance things like pedagogy, collaboration, and note-taking in the modern-day classroom by doing studies on these specific subjects. They also provide a whole bunch of links to some very cool projects like VATIC which is an awesome video annotation tool. I suggested it to Mandy who was going to give a presentation to the CDC for studying the Beltline, but, in … Continue reading

2 Comments

Oculus Rift — The Nausea Machine

  November 12, 2014 , ,

Hey Guys! Our Oculus Rift SDK2 kits are in! I spent a great deal of time with it over the weekend so I’d like to give a quick overview of what I’ve discovered: 1) It’s pretty difficult to setup. It took about 5 hours of fiddling with settings and looking online through forums to get this thing working properly–that being said–I was using my laptop and the SDK2 is not particularly fond of laptops with dual gpus like my own. Rather than use my Nvidia GPU, it will default to the integrated Intel GPU. This is a problem on their end. Regardless–I found a weird workaround to get this thing going! The downside is that I can’t mirror the goggle’s vision to my desktop–so you can’t see what someone is playing unfortunately until their dual GPU issue is fixed. Beyond that–learning the settings to adjust pupil distance, etc. is not particularly intuitive either, which is problematic because of the nausea that occurs if the settings aren’t tweaked properly. 2) Nausea, Nausea, and more Nausea. No matter how I tweak the goggle’s settings–some demos or games will consistently make me ill every time after about 5 minutes. Half-Life 2 is one of those games. Although it is stunning to explore–I get ill quite quickly and have to put the goggles down. I will continue to feel ill for about 15-20 minutes afterwards. It’s hard to pass it up though–nothing is quite as unnerving as walking up to a person in the … Continue reading