Ethan Printz
Description
This Unity-based VR experience seeks to recount New York City’s history through the perpetual changing of its environments. One location is tracked through its many changes over hundreds of years. The hope is to be factual in nature, educational in context, and fun to experience. For the purposes of this virtual show, I will act as tour guide through the historical environment, guiding viewers through a first-person view while explaining the historical significance of the environments. The location I chose for this incarnation of the project is just off the Northeast corner of Washington Square Park, on the street of Washington Square East, as this location had an abundance of historical reference material to examine and carries personal weight for many of the students in our community. I examined hundreds of photos, drawing, maps, and writings to construct these environments as realistically as possible- though there is still some manipulation of the visual environment and usage of assets to cut down on modeling time needed in light of my other four final projects. Movement in the experience is teleportation-based, both around the environment and onto points in order to teleport between time periods. While the project is in a perfectly presentable and feature-complete at the moment, there will nonetheless be some small additions to it by the time of the show. I’ll scatter about some of my reference materials within the scene, will improve the audio soundscapes, and will touch up the modeling and placement of assets within the scenes.
Jaekook Han
Description
“School libraries exist throughout the world as learning environments that provide space (physical and digital), access to resources, and access to activities and services to encourage and support student, teacher, and community learning.”
– IFLA School Library Guidelines, 2015
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library is the main library at New York University, the core place where research takes place. Students and faculty visit the Bobst Library for their study and to interact with library functions as listed by the IFLA guidelines.
When I visited Bobst Library last semester, I had an unpleasant experience, where I spent a long time wandering around the library trying to find the right room and right bookshelf. There was no clear physical or digital way-finding indicator. This experience made me wonder if there are ways to help students and faculty navigate the library more efficiently. This marks the beginning of the project, Bobst.
Bobst focuses on the core function of the library, which is searching and finding a book.
The app shows you where to go and where to check, you can also keep and manage a record of the books you want. Furthermore, you can check the seat availability in the library to study. The original website asks users to open a new page to find book information, while the app’s intuitive user interface design reduces the steps it takes to find a book.
Tanic Nakpresha
Description
Artifice uses virtual reality technology to explore human connection.
Two players are invited to participate in Artifice. At the beginning of the experience, both players put on their VR headset in separate rooms. A narrator explains their individual missions. Player One is asked to serve as the judge to observe three robots' movements with the goal of identifying the other human player. Player Two serves as a performer in one of the robot avatar's body. Their crucial task is to perform different activities in the hope of demonstrating humanness and distinguishing him/herself from other pre-programmed robots.Hopefully this experience will spark a conversation about the reasoning behind their decision-making and share their uncanny valley experience together.
Artifice invites two participants to explore an alternate reality that takes place in a post-epidemic world.. At Artifice lab, a tech company provides a service allowing human consciousness to be uploaded to a robot. This service is often utilized by family members of the deceased who are not ready to let go of their loved ones. After consciousness is uploaded to a new body, the person no longer has to worry about aging and illness. However, there are overwhelming demands for this service. In the beta program, the company could only select a few candidates to be uploaded. The candidates need to go through quality control calibration to make sure they are able to maintain their human movement with their new robot body. The company selects judges to observe their movement and make a decision on who is the most human human deserving to go out of this lab with a new body.
Wenjing Liu
Description
A look at looking (through not looking) is an artistic research project that consists of three experiments that defamiliarize users’ predominant way of perceiving familiar contexts with other animals’ perceptual mechanisms.
Episode I. How does a dog understand a map?
A physical map of the ITP floor made from smells. Users sniff around the map to feel the spatial relation.
Episode II. How does a digital interface feel to a mole?
An AR application in which users are invited to experience the haptic texture of a digitally rendered blanket from artist’ childhood.
Episode III. What does /Apple Logo.jpg/ mean to a bat?
A VR experience in which users are embodied as a bat wandering in Time Square, trying to understand humans through echolocating.
Emily Lin
Description
Electronics require an inordinate amount of material and labor to manufacture. From the mining sites to the clean room, there are thousands of hands, chemicals, and minerals that make a technological product possible. In the process of creating high technology there are significant amounts of waste generated that give rise to health and environmental issues. Waste and wasting happens throughout the manufacturing and supply chain, not just at the point of disposal. In addition, the infrastructure for discarding an electronic item consists of a multitude of processes and machinery. Few of our current disposal methods, including recycling, are optimal – our options take for granted the high labor, environmental, energy and health impacts required to create the technological products we've come to rely on.
The purpose of this project is not to condemn high technology, but rather to show the complicated movement of electronic materials and to empower others to imagine alternatives to this current cycle.