I would like to use this post to reflect on my progress for the week…

New Performance Opportunity

This week I met with Brendan and some of the teachers who I assisted for last fall. They have been working with Mozilla Hubs to create virtual performances throughout the pandemic and just recently hosted OnBoardXR, a one act festival that had five performances in the same instance. Brendan invited me to be part of the next iteration of the festival which will hopefully take place in the next couple of months. I had already showed him my prototype of performance one, so I am planning to develop it for this opportunity.

Hubs Integration

I have a few ideas for how I may integrate this performance with Hubs. First, I am thinking of sharing a feed of my performance from my physical space, showcasing the reactive lighting that I have set up. This feed will also be used to share my live audio and my Alexa talkback. It is going to take some calibration to get everything right with the audio. I may need to share the browser sound from the Alexa Console instead of having the output from my speaker itself. I would like for this feed to be imbedded in a VR space that has some resemblance to my physical environment as well.

The main feature I want to have for my performance is for the objects in the VR space respond to my breathing. Returning to the image of a breathing room, I would like to find some way for the virtual objects’ scale to increase proportionally to the sound of my breathing and for the virtual room to glow the same colors as my physical space on the live feed. I spent some time this week looking into the capabilities of this. I gained a sense of Networked A-Frame from Fabien Benetou’s Hubs Tools. Fabien is someone both Brendan and I have spoken to in the past. He was the first person I saw have his physical desk light turn off from VR. I had some trouble understanding where userMedia is being captured and stored. I may try and reach out to Fabien to see if this is possible. My plan is to control the scale of the networked elements by analyzing the amplitude of my microphone input into hubs. If it is impossible to access this, I may try and create a bot from another webpage that will do the audio analysis and inject the relevant info into the Hubs development tools console. I don’t think I am interested in connecting my MQTT broker to a hubs instance. I would like to keep working with the framework I have in place and just have that running in a separate tab. I still want to be developing aspects for the summer in person performances.

Performance One Rewrite

This week I also rewrote performance one to include a completed ending and some more world building. I chose to have things go totally to shit at the end with there being different versions of the Amazon Memory Machine plan. The ending isn’t completely seamless yet. I am imagining it fading to black as the ads run. I also added in the description of some effects, including potentially projections, that will help emphasize the power of this technology to make memory. Altogether, I am only worried that it does not make sense to have ads be what makes this go to shit. Would it potentially be better for the algorithm to bring up blatantly bad memories. I want to make sure I am making this clearer for the audience.

Plan For Next Week and Break

I would like to spend next week focusing on developing performance one to a place that I can begin integrating it into hubs. This will mean coding the new dialogue and interactions as well as designing the sound effects for the different portions. For next week’s presentation, I would like to also make a mash up of all three performance prototype recordings to give the audience a sense of what I am working on. Over the break, I think I will need to hit the ground running with performance two. There is a lot I want to do technically and I still have to nail down the user interaction I would like. I would also like to spend time over the break doing some user testing for people in the group.

Looking forward to the summer, and after my talk with Andrew, I am a bit worried timing wise about mashing these all into a larger performance with a few smaller performances in between. I think it is still possible, but it will certainly take a ton of work. I do like the idea of having a couple of shorter, pallet cleansing performances in between for fun. I have that old list that I can draw from.