Week 4 February 18, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , trackbackOkay, I’ll openly admit that this week’s progress has been pretty lame. I didn’t have as much time to put into it as usual (though I think this past week will be the exception rather than the rule) and Second Life classes have been particularly uncooperative with my schedule. So, the rundown of what I’ve done.
I read another paper, the last of the three which presents a particular visualization from the special issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment. Here’s the citation:
Sapp, Craig Stuart. ”Visual Hierarchical Key Analysis.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 19 pages.
This article was a little more explicit about its methodology than some of the earlier ones, but problematically the music theory and statistics are a bit over my head at this point. That stuff’s pretty high-level, it seems, in a field of which I have no real knowledge. Further, this visualization doesn’t lend itself to the Second Life method quite as well (though I don’t feel like any of the visualizations I’ve encountered so far really lend themselves to being done in Second Life, to be frank). Like the others, it has videos which I hope to post in the near future (see below).
I’ve also, as Mike suggested, looked up how Windows Media does its music visualizations. I came across the Microsoft Developer Network site, which has information on developing plug-ins and things for various MS programs, including visualizations for Windows Media. The visualizations are programmed in MS Visual C++, and there is a method which allows the player to send a periodic “snapshot” of the music being played in the form of a two-dimensional array containing frequency and waveform data. That data can be passed around in C++ code as integers, allowing visualization developers to use it to affect draw commands to the screen. Conceptually simple, if not enormously helpful when it comes to more “scientific” visualizations, but still good to know.
The other major thing I’ve done this past week, aside from some very basic tooling around Second Life which really didn’t amount to much (how do I get to the right island now that I’ve accepted your friendship, Dr. Polack?), is try to get some of the things I need working on my computer (or, in some cases, working again, in the wake of my hard drive loss). This includes Second Life, since it would just be more convenient to use in my room (especially on weekends when the lab is occupied by events like the VGO…not that I would’ve been working Saturday night, but hypothetically…) and Quicktime so that I can view those videos. I’ve had some major network issues with doing any of this, however. Over the weekend I couldn’t get any downloads to even start; the connection would always time out. Today I had a little more success: the downloads would begin, and even run pretty well for a time, but always dropped to 0 KB/sec after a while, and then canceled themselves a short time later (some error about the source file being unreadable). In short, after more than an hour of trying to get some of this software on my laptop, I am no closer to being able to use my laptop for anything useful.
I’ve also got an SL class later tonight, NCI’s Building 3. That will be my second building class. I’ve also got a couple general intro classes which taught the basics of rezzing, scripting, texturing, and using SL, as well as several scripting classes. The class tonight should take an hour.
Total time (counting tonight’s class): 4 hours.
Comments»
Search for “Eagle Island” and find the teleporter orb near the trailer to teleport to professor polack’s property.
Its a little boring looking primitive ( a sphere i think….) and its near a bunch of other ones, not real obvious if you don’t know it’s there =/