Oculus Launchpad Experience 0.7

Introduction

This week has been some about some small styling changes and exploring other worlds. Also lots of thought on how VR can help us better understand all our many different realities and connections to everything else – we are, in the end, all uniquely imperfect probes into what reality is.

Past

The team has been hard at work building up the backend and front end with great tools, libraries, and best practices expected of a good web application. We have some great WebVR ideas that are still to be implemented.

Present

One of our “stories” that we are working to bring into this socialVR platform has fallen a bit behind schedule; so to allow that story time to breathe I have been exploring another story I had been thinking on earlier in the project so that we will have at least one story to showcase the power of socialVR in learning.

I have always been a fan of pondering how the universe works. During the final years of high school I was determined to go to university to become a physicist like those I had been reading about in books on quantum mechanics – Richard Feynman, Leon Lederman, Brian Greene, Wolfgang Pauli, Carl Sagan etc. My 18th birthday presents from my parents were even advanced calculus and modern physics textbooks! I later found out, after a year of distracted undergraduate math/physics, that a more fitting direction was to explore how technology can better aid my own creative creation. My love for better understanding the universe has not abated though – but I now think of myself more as a huge fan and spectator of the “sport”.

This week I have been sketching some ideas about what a story about how the astrophysics of neutron stars could be introduced to interested learners (like myself back in high school). I am hoping to also bring in how there are many different voices in science contributing to their exploration. Will hopefully have something more concrete on this soon!

In the meantime here are some sketches of the three locations I wish to explore: a casual and small university observatory, a graduate lab meeting, and a neutron star.

And now for something completely different … Ontological Design

In trying to come up with a better name that better encompasses the impetus of this VR project I had been thinking on “Ontological Design” after a colleague reminded me that a word that describes the interconnectedness of everything is “ontology” – study into the nature of being. Ontological design is a concept I had ran across a couple of years ago that has fascinated me to no end. Its basic premise is that as we (humans) design tools, environments, and new ways of thinking these tools, environments, and concepts in turn design us back – for example, think of how carrying smartphones in our pockets has changed how we communicate and digest information. How is the inevitable ubiquity of VR/AR technologies going to change us further? Now think on who is designing these technologies? How do we make sure we design a future way of thinking that encompasses more diverse types of people and perspectives? This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night!

Read about Ontological Design here in much greater detail by Anne-Marie Willis: http://www.academia.edu/888457/Ontological_designing

And here is a great introductory video by Jason Silva during his Shots of Awe series:

Future

I am going to focus on creating greater agency within these virtual worlds through embodied interactions, building this new world roughly, and to rough in some locomotion and object interaction methods across multiple devices. Also, I need to think more on some sort of name to better describe the entirety of this project.

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