The Future of Storytelling – TimefireVR

2013127_StoryMOOC

Started a free online class today titled “The Future Of Storytelling.” This eight-week “MOOC” or Massive Open Online Course is being presented by the Design Department at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, in Germany. The map I’ve included shows where participants are located. Fifty-thousand people from around the globe have signed up, not everyone has noted on the map where they are, but I think it’s probably fairly representative. Think about this for a moment; the average size class at this university is between 10 and 30 students and they are all present on campus in Potsdam, Germany, but online there are 50,000 of us participating. How many more people would have signed up if they’d heard about the MOOC?

While this is my first semi-formal online class, my wife has been busy off and on for the past few years taking online courses, most recently a free Python programming class held by Coursera and Rice University. What really drew me into blogging about this is the map above. If you have any doubt about our world being a global community, just check out where my classmates live. They are from everywhere, including Nunavut, Canada, Bhutan, and Timor, to southern Chile and Namibia. Sure, we all know the internet is a global medium, but when was the last time you were in a classroom with people from around the world WANTING and voluntarily learning the same thing as you?

So why is this important to Virtual Reality? Because education is going to move into the 3rd dimension and it’s going to change our relationship to wanting to learn, that’s why! How, you might ask? In the case of VR and then the arrival of positional tracking, we are going to be able to reach out and manipulate the avatar we are trying to animate, for one example. Then, with AR (Augmented Reality), we will have a 3D model that will hover between us and our computer screen of, say, a giant weta (you really do need to click this link) that we can spin around, zoom in to, and see its movement. Matter of fact, we can all have the world’s largest 3D natural science museum in our homes that will allow us to explore everything from molecules and cells to interstellar gas clouds. This has been the promise of these technologies for decades, but the time of their arrival is now just around the corner. Today, I learned about castAR and felt that I’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks; how did their Kickstarter campaign get past me? castAR is an inexpensive Augmented Reality headset that looks like it might be in competition with the Oculus Rift, but I think it will more likely be another amazing stepping stone to what is shaping up to be the most rapid development phase we have yet seen regarding our relationship to the virtual and augmented world we will one day soon start to explore. Check them out; their magic wand is going to get a lot of attention.

Like the industrial revolution that accompanied the advent of the steam engine or the modernization of roads and housing following World War II, we are entering an era where millions of people are going to be needed to build our new infrastructure using skills in jobs that only existed in small numbers as those advancements first started to be developed. Game companies will continue to make games. Movie studios will learn how to make immersive 3D movies we can be in the middle of. But it will be an entirely new economic engine of small companies and individuals that will give us new planets to explore, bizarre creatures to interact with, and scientific processes we can see and play within the safety of virtual exploration, for just a few examples. If you are going to participate and be one of these new “Virtual Construction Workers,” you have a long road ahead of you where you too better be signing up for free online courses and learning all you can about digital arts, music, programming, animation, and science that might prepare you for building your own version of how this virtual world might look.

Pioneers Of The Universe

We are explorers of the digital plains, miners extracting bits in order to build new towers of light that only exist on the frontier of our electricity-amplified world. Numerically derived substances become emissive with properties that have been designed in the mind and transferred between one another like so much binary noise, making the transition from wet organic matter to traveling hair-thin strands of glass before riding a copper route to a box of transmogrified sand that allows me, the operator, to be a creator.

I harness the brains of countless people who have sacrificed banality in the effort to capture maths in such ways that they have become code, tools, and software that do stuff. My gratitude extends from Euclid and his theater of geometry to Galileo, who once said, “The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.”

Today, digital artists are using those triangles, circles, and geometrical figures to construct dynamic environments that have pulled the masses into witnessing the illumination of the “dark labyrinth.” Video games, computer graphics, electronic music, and 3D animated films are but a ploy to pull humanity forward where the border of the known universe unfolds. Our ancestors first observed the work of fire before entrusting those “crazy” enough to play with it. Once made safe, everyone could utilize the dangerous but useful energy contained within. Today it is at our fingertips, and we think nothing of bringing it into our homes with a twist of a knob so it may cook our food.

Similarly, we have a pipe that now delivers the fire of the mind directly to our homes, and most of us have grown accustomed to its ubiquitous presence, not only via wire but in the very air around us. Like fire, the presence of information is not only used for the warming of leftovers, it can be used in the forging of the new from the unknown. It was fire that allowed us to make ceramics, glass, steel, electricity, propulsion systems, and much of what makes the world around us convenient. Now that electronic bits have made us comfortable in our surroundings, how will the exotic uses of that potentiality alter us going forward?

We must begin to comprehend the “next” word. That word is creation. It is what we humans do; we create. One does not need to be a God to enter this domain, just as one does not need to be the Shaman of the Fire in order to warm the home. The magic is no longer external; it is within. Within our minds and transmutable through our hands, we can bend, fold, and manipulate the flow of the visual universe. We are set to become the architects of this electronic domain in ways larger than our consumptive selves allow us to yet realize. The Age of Creativity stands before us, but the gulf of ability still looms as a chasm of uncertainty.

It is time to smash that divide to recognize it is our self-imposed and media-manifested doubts and fears that have erected the barriers between the consumptive self and the creative self. These past three decades of personal computing and the thousands of years of prior advancements have all been leading us to this point where humanity’s rarest tools and skills in the forms of knowledge and education are being offered to nearly all people. They arrive within the time it takes to understand that they are free or, at a relatively low cost, available to all. Software is the tool that lends each of us the brain trust of thousands, if not millions, of minds whose collective ability is brought to our front and center with a mouse click or a simple gesture.

Learning to read and create the universe with a visual and audible language that allows us to communicate across barriers is what our new digital tools are laying out before us. Complexity and creative fun can and will be synonymous. It is up to us to share our sense of amazement that is brought on when we employ these evolving digital tools of creativity.

Paths

We have many a path to consider when the road forks and we need to take on a new direction. So it is as we head into Virtual Reality, and the tools we will use are not set in stone. None of us know for certain what the face of VR is going to look like, although we can conjecture that it will look a lot like today, only different. Okay, I anticipate that it will be really different. Like the potential to be out of this world crazy different. The only problem is that for something to be seen that way, there must be a “normal” to compare it to. But before we get to blow the minds of the uninitiated, we have to build the foundation of “normal.”

Today, we can choose to develop “worlds” from a wide variety of tools ranging from Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Unity, and dozens of other environments to the private engines employed within companies that are used by them exclusively. Along the way, we will learn about textures and materials and how Substance Designer, Photoshop, Gimp, nDo and dDo, Lightroom, and our digital cameras will be needed to paint these places we assemble. Before we ever get to those images, we will also have to decide on which 3D modeling software we are going to take up, such as Blender, Modo, 3DS Max, Maya, Softimage, Houdini, C4D, or a couple of others. Just learning to think in x,y, and z coordinates is a monumental task by itself.

Gaming engines, image manipulation, 3D modeling, and we haven’t even touched on motion capture, puppeteering, animation, sound design, audio editing, or writing and designing a place others might want to visit.

So why not make it simple and just choose a single skill set and focus on being an expert in one area? Because those days are coming to an end.

Forty years ago as the personal computer revolution was getting underway, a small class of the curious sequestered themselves in a corner of their home and started to learn how a computer might be helpful to themselves and maybe to others. The process was slow and laborious; we either learned to code or manually entered instructions as they had been printed out in the back of a magazine. Fifteen years later someone could make good money entering data or typing documents. That industry has since shifted, and no one in Western society is rewarded for being an expert in a word processor or a spreadsheet alone. Ten years after that, in 1998, if you had mad Photoshop skills, you could make bank creating graphics for an up-and-coming internet property. Today, designers often struggle to find work where Photoshop by itself will give them viable employment. Ask any coder/programmer when the last year being knowledgeable in a single language was enough to land them a six-figure income.

The evolutionary writing is on the proverbial cave wall for many; writ large, it says, “Thou shall not gain credibility or a decent job in the next economy without being a master of the suite.”

This “Suite” is an assembly of tools, probably of your choosing, that says, “I have skills that are flexible, and I can demonstrate an ability to adapt.”

And why do I believe this? Because after much of humanity automates itself into a lack of purpose, we will have to ask ourselves, “What else is there?” The only conceivable answer is we must entertain ourselves. If Virtual Reality is the environment we are going to explore as the interface to that entertainment, well, that space is infinitely large. To fill the space of infinity, we will embark on creating “stuff” to play with, to explore, and to give us purpose again.

In effect, we will all become farmers again, except the crops are digital assets that feed the mind. A new agrarian age in which we cultivate the electronic landscape, bringing us full circle to a previous time when the majority of us tilled the land. Except now, we will work the soil of creativity by employing Ableton or Bitwig to sequence our beats and sounds. You’ll pop open Blender to knock out some 3D furniture or 3D-Coat to sculpt up some creatures. Connect the motion capture data from your Xbox Kinect to a digital skeleton and bring that dancing blob of pixels to life in your retro-future-psychedelic-historic-dystopian-sci-fi city on the internet. Maybe a multi-story gallery dedicated to your family will be erected in your new cyberspace environment that will display a living family tree of photos and videos that forever tell the story of the Smith family. Well, you are going to have to be the one to break out Premiere, After Effects, Reaper, Photoshop, and Unity to put it all together – just as your parents shot video on bulky cameras and your grandparents pasted black and white photos into albums.

It’s time to “Get it!” Complexity and adaptability are the order of the day. We no longer tinker in isolation on computers barely faster than a modern watch. We no longer become experts in typing documents. Photoshopping is now a hobby, not a career (by itself, anyway). If there are 1000 people out there mastering a dozen really difficult pieces of software, tomorrow, it will be all of us.

Starting Over….Again and Again

With gusto, we jump into knowing exactly what we want until those newly acquired skills become refined enough to show us how this is exactly what we don’t want. No problem, clean off the canvas and start modeling new stuff.

Learn how to make amazing materials for those new models; wow, they have so much depth and realism. Oh, there’s something else out there that can make them even better? Okay, we’ll just scrap what we’ve done so far and try this new way. Good thing we’re not a year into this.

Uh oh, there might be a problem with the game engine we’ve chosen to work with. Time to start considering the alternatives. Sure, but all roads bring me right back to where we started. Well, then, we can be secure in knowing our decision was a sound one, at least for the next week or two.

This is the dialogue that goes on nearly every day. Certainty when exploring the unknown is amorphous, requiring a kind of flexibility that reminds me of something I was told while on a white water trip through the Grand Canyon, “Indecision is the key to flexibility.”

Today’s decision is the seed for tomorrow’s exciting new way of doing things; that makes way more sense anyway.

How Do People Play In The Now?

3D_Coat

Is it time to leave old habits behind or to at least start adopting new ones? There are many people who will not think twice on any given day about grabbing a video to watch to close out the day. Me? I opt to explore what I can learn about 3D sculpting with the help of 3D Coat this evening. This is not easy entertainment; it is not grabbing a beer with the guys and talking shop or sports; it’s getting into the thick of hurting one’s brain. I’m learning a new language of voxels, live clay, retopo, PTex, UV unwrap, vox trees, and a type of noise called Voronoi. It feels archaic to me that we would fall into routines of computer gaming, watching television, and even reading. What of hardcore learning? There’s an educational version of 3D Coat that only costs $99 or about the cost of five DVDs. With it, I can make cubes with meaningless shapes or bulbous forms as I have today, see above. I can become frustrated that there are almost 150 tutorial videos on the creators of 3D Coat’s YouTube channel, and I don’t really have a clue where to start. Or I can laugh about it and delight that I’m alive in an age where some of the most complex creative digital tools are available to me and that, beyond the cost of acquisition, the materials are effectively free as long as I pay for a constant supply of electricity.

Entertainment in front of a device showing us moving pictures has become an old passive habit our ancestors “participated” in, just as many generations ago primitive peoples sat around the fire under the night sky: though I feel there is big merit in doing just that today. We are once again transitioning, just as we did away from candlelight and books to radio and electrical lights, to TV and microwave oven-cooked dinners; we are now able to warm up to the complexity that pushes our ability to work with our minds and imaginations because we own computers and are connected to the internet. Just as we’ve adopted the ideas of balanced diets, regular exercise, and career advancement, I think it’s about time to explore those things that help us create and explore skills we may have never known we had.

Finding New Stuff To Explore

The USGS National Map

First up on today’s work is to visit the National Map courtesy of the United States Geological Service. There are dozens of different ways to view the terrain of our country, I need an elevation map. I click on the area of interest to draw a bounding box and end up with a massive area far beyond my selection; I’ll figure out those details later. I place my order and within seconds I have an email notification where I can collect my map. Wow, 353MB for the file, and it’s only a small corner of the Grand Canyon. Decompressed I now have almost 500MB of various files including a massive GridFloat file, numerous shape and .xml files along with a dozen other files for good measure.

A TerreSculpt screen capture after importing height map data

I load the GridFloat into TerreSculpt’s utility for converting the file into a Height Map. Not being a cartographer or GIS (Geographic Information Systems) specialist I am lost with the options I have to deal with the data. But I’m not done with it, next up it has to be converted to a .bt file (binary terrain). From there it can be imported into TerreSculpt proper and then exported again, this time as a Raw 16bit Binary Heightmap. Now it’s ready to be imported into another program.

USGS elevation data converted with TerreSculpt and imported into Unreal Developers Kit - UDK3

That program is UDK also known as Unreal Developers Kit. This is essentially a gaming engine, though who says one has to play games? Building this stuff is anything but a game. The landscape you are looking at is deep within the Grand Canyon near the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado; of course, this would be the first place I would go due to the influence the place had on me and my desire to one day share it virtually. I have to wonder out loud, how long will it be until I can put a boat down on the river and row down those 225.9 miles of churning waters in virtual reality? Seems to me that day is getting closer and closer.

Caroline Wise wearing the Oculus Rift checking out the Grand Canyon in virtual reality

So close as a matter of fact that here is my wife, Caroline Wise wearing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset checking out the Grand Canyon National Park – virtually!