Projection

here is an awesome video I came across just thought i'd share

The Official Ralph Lauren 4D Experience - New York from Ralph Lauren on Vimeo.

Final Reflection

Here we are at post 51. I really cannot believe this semester is over already, it's so crazy. It seems like just yesterday I was sitting in class wondering how the heck I would make it through this semester. At first, I was very skeptical of this class. But I really learned a lot from this class and maybe ambiguity isn't such a bad teaching strategy. I think that Stony Brook needs to have more hands on classes like this one and more classes with "face time." It's so hard to learn in a lecture hall with 600 other kids you don't get that one on one experience like you do in classes like this one. I took this class just to fulfill a DEC D but in the end I learned much more than I expected and I really am glad I took it.

Hamlet 2

Hamlet and Ophelia

Hamlet and Ophelia

King and Queen

All four actors did a great job. The beginning seen with Hamlet

was very dramatic and really captured the audience's attention.

Hamlet

The cast of Hamlet preparing for the show.

RUR

The cast of RUR getting set up before their performace. I didnt take too many pictures because it was hard to see them from where I was sitting being that they werent really on stage. I thought the idea of a monologue was interesting and I can understand the simplicity of it but it was still a bit boring for me.

sketchup texture

here is another sketchup texture that I found that I did. I really enjoyed using sketchup this semester. being any major at StonyBrook we are forced to take so many pointless classes with the DEC requirements. But, sketchup is a tool that we learned in this class that we can use in our everyday lives for the rest of our lives. It is an easy program and if it werent for this class I would have probably never been exposed to it.

Hamlet vs. RUR

Overall I agree with many of the others that the Hamlet performance was more interesting. I thought all four actors did a great job. That being said though, I can appreciate the art of a simple monologue, especially with an interactive audience the need for a real performance wasn't necessary. The only thing was the script was a bit boring and too long. Overall, I thought both performances were a success and you could tell it was a semester of hard work and really showcased the talents of students here at Stony Brook.

The Tank

Arriving at The Tank on Saturday, it was actually almost everything I had expected. I knew that theaters in the city are usually small, but the professor said he wanted 400 people to come so I was a bit skeptical. Overall though, I really like the feel of it. It was very nostalgic and vintage looking. Although some might consider it to be runned down or dingy I think that really gives it character. You can tell that the people that work there really enjoy the space.

Kinect Hack

A group of MIT students hacked the Kinect and made a robot that can actually "see" it's surroundings and listen to commands.

Website: http://singularityhub.com/2010/11/17/hacked-irobot-uses-xbox-kinect-to-see-the-world-obey-your-commands-video/

cool architecture

This first photo is of the new math and geommetry building on campus. I passed on my way to physics on the last day of class and it caught my eye because it has that phi element that we talked about in the beginning of the semester.

This photo is an awesome building we came across on our way to the Tank. It almost reminded me of something Frank Gehry would desgin.

deer in my backyard??

I was looking through pictures I took at the tank on Saturday on my phone and I came across pictures that I took over the summer of a deer family that wandered in my back yard. We don't have a fence and we're surrounded by woods so it's not an unlikely siting...they come around quite often actually. There's even a young buck and some cute lil bambis!

greenhouse gases

As you walk out of Penn Station on the Madison Square Garden side you're practically smacked in the face with a giant sign that shows the amount of greenhouse gases entering our atmosphere. I took this video on August 12, 2009, and the numbers are continuously growing. The video shows you just how quickly too. According to experts, humans release 6400000000000 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere each year. This is in the form of CO2 and CH4, carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are greenhouse gases contributing to the warming of our Earth. Sure baseball in January may seem like a good thing but as the ice caps are melting, many coastal regions are threatened, including Long Island and Manhatten.

Final post, Thoughts on the class

So this is my 50th blog post, the big five O. Looking back on the class and everything we had talked about, done, etc. i feel somewhat sad knowing that the class is at an end. I'm going to miss those strange discussions that we had in class that we always so vague but yet at the same time interesting.

I have learned a lot more then i thought i would have when i first decided to take this theatre course. I really didn't think that we would have been talking about the real world and all those different things we talked about. Most of the classes that i have taken so far at Stonybrook are the classes where the teachers sit there and lecture giving their multiple choice testes. This class however was much different from the other classes, which i thought was a nice and welcome change. As i look back on everything we have done and all i have learned from the class i realize that what i have learned will stay with me and hopefully get me a better job then those pink collar jobs the professor always talked about.

Final: What worked and what didn't

So this blog i wanted to dedicate to what i felt worked well during the final and what didn't work so well. The touch OSC program worked very well, it did exactly what we wanted it to do. The thing that didn't work so well with the touch OSC program was that the people who had been given a port number didn't use the program when the performance started. So for half the performance the OSC program just sat there not doing anything. I don't know if it was because they forgot their number or maybe they just didn't know how to use it but that was something that could have went better. The projects overall were good. The images were easy to see and were not too distracting. The other thing that i think was pretty good was the VJ machines. I didn't get to see them much during the hamlet skin movie but during the R.U.R reading i was able to see the VJ machines, which were overall pretty cool. We had originally had a lot of things planed for the final but when we got there and started setting things up we realized that not everything we had wanted to do was going to be used. i think for the most part the final was successful and was a good way to evaluate what will and won't work if anyone ever wanted to do a similar project in the future.

R.U.R reading

At the final the graduate students also did an R.U.R reading. The reading was pretty cool, although they didn't have to memorize any lines or anything. The entire story of the R.U.R was very interesting. I had read about it before when the professor told us about it earlier in the semester. I had briefly glanced over the summary of the story, but this version that the graduate students did was a little different from the one i saw on wikipedia. The electronics we had going on during the R.U.R play was similar to what we were doing during the hamlet skin. We were mostly doing the VJ-ing which was pretty cool.

After the R.U.R reading, that night on the train ride back home i was thinking about that whole story and what it would be like if something like that actually ever happened. I thought about what would i do, where would i go, what would happen? There have been many movies over the years that had similar topics. Although the main idea was always the same, the idea was changed very slightly, some movies had zombies others robots. I came to the conclusion that if anything like R.U.R ever happened i would head for the Antarctica or the Sahara dessert or something like that. Because after all what zombie, robot, etc would want to go to those places?

Hamlet skin project

The hamlet skin project was pretty good i thought. Overall the students who were in the play did a very good job. They were all entertaining and kept my attention throughout the play. There were some mistakes and mess-ups here and there but that is expected when you only have a month or so to remember all those lines, on top of all those classes none the less. The technology we had running during the hamlet play ran relatively well. It was a bit hard to see it sometimes but then again you wouldn't want it to overpower the performance of the actors/actresses.

The hamlet skin was the project that was primarily geared towards my class. It was the project that we had been working on the whole semester. Seeing it finally in action was pretty cool and made me realized what the professor had been saying all semester. That the class was going to be about the real world, and be something besides just the walls of the classroom.

Setting up the final

The day of the final we all got there and started setting things up. Once we started plugging in all the projectors, laptops, cables, etc. the final project actually became a real thing. Up until that point it was just something we had talked about, something we had only planed. Now it was finally a real thing and we were going to be able to show everyone what we had done the entire semester. It was a good feeling setting everything up and getting it to work the way it was supposed to. Luckily there wasn't any major malfunctions with our electronics and the plays went relatively smoothly.

Trip to the city

So on the day of the final it was either i was driving to the city or i was going to take the train. I decided the best thing to do would be to take the train. I figured there was going to be no where to park and i didn't want to have to deal with just driving in general. The train ride wasn't bad, but it was the first time i took the train into the city. The whole day was a new experience to me. I wasn't sure how difficult it was going to be getting on the right trains, changing trains, finding my way around the city, and what not. It was surprisingly a lot easier then i thought it was going the be. The trains were pretty straight forward, everything was labeled and was easy enough to figure out. The streets of New York were all labeled and finding where to go was pretty easy as well.

The final gig

So today is the day that we are going to final do our final project. With all the technology that we have going into this event it makes me somewhat nervous. The event is pretty much solely based off technology and requires it to run properly. If a projector, computer, or something else were to work improperly it could be pretty bad for the gig. I have faith in the technology though. I believe it will pull through for the event and the gig will be a huge hit. The gig isn't only a final project after all. It is also an experimental project like the professor said. This is something that could become the future. Involving the audience in something is a great idea. When a person goes to a movie or a museum or something along those lines. Imagine if they could control one aspect of what they are viewing. The interaction would have to be quick though, no waiting around, because it's all about the quick feedback that gets the person involved in the show. When you do something and it causes something else to happen you feel more connected to the show because now you are a part of it. So when we go to the final gig don't think of it as only a final, think of it also as what could be the possible future.

Kinect

I would have never guessed that the kinect would have so many different applications when i first heard of it. I went on youtube and was looking at all the different things people had done with it. One guys was drawing with his hands, another guy had created an augmented reality, another guy was controlling a vacuum, and there were a lot of other things too. Seeing everything that was possible with the kinect it made me think about the future. In the furture it could be possible that they have a camera, like the kinect, set up that will ring you out. Instead of having cashiers you would have a camera that would know when you approach and ring everything out for you.

After the kinect came out it got hacked in about a week or so. Since then so many people have been playing around with it trying out new things. It was pretty smart on Microsoft's behave that they made the kinect so people could hack it and experiment with it. Just by them doing that, the kinect has so many more applications now. Comppanies like apple, which try to make sure that none of their products can get hacked, are less likely to experience progress because no one else can try to play around with the new things they make. I mean it's only logical that the more people you have playing around with something the more new things you are going to create.