3D Printing

So up until this past week I have never tried to partake in any type of 3D printing, I have only seen pictures or videos online about how creative people have gotten with the newer technology. As it has become more and more common with who is able to have access to the 3D printers, it allows more people to use their creative talents to make amazing objects. I was not sure what I was going to be able to create, and I really couldn’t think of a great object to make so I decided on making a rocket ship. Not the most complex thing to make but I like to think that it is a good starting point for my first ever 3D creation. It is somewhat mesmerizing to me to see the 3D printers at work in the lab on campus. Each with their own task and slowly over time we see the actual items being made layer by layer. I have seen those machines before because I have some classes in the Langford buildings and each time I go in that lab I am always impressed by the things that students have made. Even seeing some of my own classmate’s creations over the week was great to see because it showed how limitless we can be in the sandbox style of design we had access to through Tinkercad. I would like to pursue some type of 3D printing while I have access to the machines while I still am a student here at Texas A&M because with practice and more time I think I can get better at it and make greater projects.

Where do we get news from?

Most people in our society tend to rely on their technology on a day by day basis to make it through life. We are to a point where it would be impossible to go a day without any form of technology. I see it as normal part of society in the real world but each person varies on how much they use it in their daily routine. One thing that is coming more consistent is how people receive news and gather new information. We used to gather new information by either listening to a news report, the radio, or reading it in a newspaper. Now we can have all of that in a single app on our smartphones if we needed it. However, that is not how many people even look for news in our current society. People now turn to social media to see what is going on in the world around them. It allows the user to search the information for themselves if they want and sometimes they can avoid any bias statements that news outlets are putting out on tv or their websites. In order to grab attention on social media sites, users will create simple eye-catching charts and graphs to attract more people to look at what they are saying. That was a reason of the artifact for this week. We took a huge source of information that the common reader would not look through, and took the information we wanted to share and simplified it with pictures and colorful charts.

Social Media

Honestly, I was completely unaware of how many social media sites there really were. When we took a look at the diagram that had many of the site broken down, I was shocked to see all of the logos from the different companies. To me when I think of social media I think of the basic everyday platforms that I use on a normal basis which would be Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But when you look at the definition we discussed in class, whenever we have an online profile for something then that becomes a new platform of social media for us. Even this week’s artifact made us aware of a new site, Storify. With that assignment we are able to interconnect the more popular websites on a story that we choose. It makes sense to have a news site to explain a new narrative based on a user created storyboard. Or even the site that I have been using for the first time this semester, this WordPress is a new platform that I would have never used unless I was in this class. Since newer websites have a normal standard of creating a public profile, they open up the possibility for them to become another popular form of social media. Even Facebook went through some major changes before it is what we know today. Without the public accessibility for most of the websites we use, then they would have never gained the popularity that they have today.

AI

As our technology is constantly growing each and every single day, we get closer and closer to the idea that we will one day have robots and AI driven machines interacting with us on a normal basis, or as some would say we are already there. We have somewhat of an understanding about what a robot is. Most people would think that a robot is something electronic that can run for specific directions and compute what it needs to do, like the Rick and Morty short video we watched with the Butter Robot. But then comes the idea of AI being integrated into the mix. AI (artificial intelligence) is the brain power behind some programs that allows a machine to listen to instructions and then execute a command. A commonly known AI would be Apple’s Siri on the iPhones and MacBook laptops. Most people would consider them an AI because they can talk to it and it would give you an answer back based on the programming that went into the speech recognition. That being said, an AI is only as smart as it is programmed to be, but that does not mean it won’t soon be able to surpass that barrier. Some machines that are being developed are able to learn and adapt to the situations they are put in, so that creates the opportunity that one day some of our AI driven robots will be able to act on their own will depending on their surroundings and orders.

Game Lab

Going into the game lab session I had no idea what to expect. I had never done something like this and I was with three other people that I did not know. So in the beginning even before we went into the session there was some awkward tension in the hallway before we went into the session. We could slightly hear the group before us talking about what they were doing as they were playing and wrapping up. As their time ran out and our started I was still unsure about how the whole experience is supposed to go. My group sat down and we introduced ourselves to each other and then began to play. I was the first one to play so I got to be the guinea pig as I stumbled through the basic controls. I was able to show the group how the mechanics worked as I worked through the first day and I had an ok run with the shift. After my turn was up each of my teammates were able to start their turn. As most games go, the levels got harder as you progressed through the game. We started to communicate more so we could try to be as efficient as we could be in order to get further into the game. After our time was up, we were told we did not do too bad, and I began to think about the meaning of the game itself. Our role in the game was to work at a station that is along the border of a country and you made the decision to allow people in or not. Each day the rules and regulations got harder and harder, and the amount that we had to keep track of is barely enough to scratch the surface of how it works in real life. Sometimes people just have to make calls in order to try and do their job correctly and at some point there are some mistakes made, or unfortunate events take place like the scripted attack during our session. It makes you think about the current issues that actually take place on a daily basis in the world.

Video Games

I have grown up playing video games for most of my life. Actually I have been told stories that I started to play Super Mario at the age of three while my uncle was still in college. I have taken this section of entertainment and made it apart of my personal routine as I grow up. Through gaming I have been able to go through a lot over the years but I never really tried to break down the meaning behind a lot of the games. For the most part I would play through a game and dive into that new realm and begin to learn the environment, rules, and other things that just become the standard when learning a new game. I did not know that by doing so that I was learning about the narratology from the story that the writers were wanting me to experience. Or there was the concept of the ontology that would create these new game elements that I was just brushing over when instead I could have stopped and taken a look at what the game developers were wanting me to focus on in their content. Now for most of the games that I play, they are considers “First Person Shooters” or “FPS” so the real objective when I play the multiplayer is to basically go after the other team with whatever objective the game-type has, then rinse and repeat. However, when I play through a story or a campaign of those games I get a whole new experience, one that ties more into a narrative element in the story telling that goes into that part of the game.

Cyborgs Among Us

The idea that there are cyborgs that are in our everyday lives sounds a bit strange and some people would automatically start to think about the Terminator, Cyborg from the DC Comics, or something along those lines. I find it interesting that the concept of an everyday cyborg is more common that we would initially think. The people in the world that have enhancements are not necessarily doing anything wrong, it is just their situation in their life. Whether it be a prosthetic limb, perhaps someone had surgery and now has support in their body due to some metallic fragments in a certain area, or maybe a prosthetic eye like we saw in the video during our class. When you think of cyborgs that way then it becomes a lot more common to have a cyborg in our everyday life. But with these enhancements or support mechanisms that people use, there will be other issues that will arise in our society. Safety of the common people could be a factor that would be discussed, or you could think about it through a competitive aspect through sports. The conflict of what will be allowed in sports that will be legal for participants with artificial enhancements will be a whole new section for our society to deal with on a normal basis. And that has actually already started with the issue of athletes with prosthetic legs running in competition. Does their lower body that does not have natural legs give them a slight edge over the other athletes that do not have prosthetics on their body? That is up for debate and will only continue to grow while the use of enhancements become more common in our society.

Augmented Reality

I was not aware that augmented reality was more common before these past few years or so. With the advancements in technology taking place all of the time I did know that it would become more common for smart phone users as time went on. I did not get a chance to use augmented reality until the Summer of 2016 when Pokemon Go came out for mobile devices and they had a camera option to make the game link up to the real world on your phone. It came as no surprise to me that augmented reality will continue to be a focus in video games because it creates the opportunity for a more immersive experience for the user. Augmented and virtual reality are both making their own impact on the delivery in gaming. As the book talks about, Samsung seems to be making good progress with the way they want to use augmented reality into their phones and “smart contact lenses” that will not require the bulky headsets and annoying gear. Google has tried something similar to contact lenses, but when they tackled augmented reality they decided to push Google Glass which at the time did not pick up enough attention that they wanted from their customer base. It may have been that the world wasn’t ready for a mainstream augmented reality product at the time. Although there is a chance that since augmented reality is still being improved, who knows what will end up being the next big thing.

Mashup

The toughest thing about the  Mashup was that I needed to find something that I could work with. In order for me to have a solid project I needed some assistance to at lease get me going in the right direction. I was at least able to have some guidance in class to give me the idea to carry through with my project. Since I was somewhat familiar with Premiere due to us using it in a previous assignment, using it again this week was a bit easier because I had a slight idea how to use the program. I did turn to Audacity for the audio editing because I am more comfortable using that program then converting it to an MP3 file and dragging it into my other project. I did the same thing last week with my Supercut and I am happy with the way that that assignment turned out. My thought process for this Mashup was a bit more complex because I wanted to map out both the introduction I used and the trailer I wanted to cut up and rearrange. I wanted to carefully take notes on specific sounds of intense scenes from the trailer while timing it well enough to use it on top of the TV show introduction. Again I am happy with the way that this project turned out and I hope that I will get good feedback to possibly improve it going forward. Using Adobe Premiere has definitely been my favorite program to learn so far.

Cinema Tech

The history of film is such a great journey not only because it is still being innovated in our age today, but there is a rich transition it has when something new was done along the way. What I mean by that would be the introduction to things like color instead of black and white or audio actually being in the film instead of having voice cards or a piano man playing throughout the film. With each new milestone we reach, there will always be more people who are going to try to surpass that achievement. After color and audio were standard, CGI stepped in and started to renovate the new idea of a standard to public. The book talks about additional sound being added that would be known as multichannel sounds which is going to be things like special effects for all things that aren’t normally made. Learning about the difference of a Supercut vs a Video Compilation was very interesting to me. I would have always thought as the two being one in the same when it came to clips of different things being put together. Learning how to use Premiere was an interesting challenge but I think that I will still have a lot to learn about the program. I am still happy with how my product turned out but I do think that some more things could have been done to improve some of the content. I downloaded the same quality for each video but I still would like to clean it up some more.