Doing of a Thing – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

poster4_transmutationOfAwarenessRESIZE

Where do the impulses that guide our decisions to do something extraordinary come from? How do motivation and drive find and guide us for the “doing of a thing?”

I’d venture to say that there are two common ways of leading one’s life: resignation or bitterness. And then there’s the rarer third way: meeting it with exuberance and delight.

In a sense, I’m describing the conscious and subconscious minds that lead us to the Pollyanna principle. This principle states that at the subconscious level, we tend to focus on the optimistic, while on the conscious level, we have a tendency to focus on the negative.

Most people I’ve met are certainly caught up in their conscious minds, while a small group, a very small group, has figured out a way of bringing their subconscious minds forward, allowing themselves to revel in the amazing. Nobody who is mired in frustration chooses to be unhappy, though. Unless they truly enjoy a traumatic struggle to find happiness.

In America, we tend to focus more on the external qualities of life than the internal. Hence, our lives, to a large extent, are a manifestation of the lifestyle we are able to put on display. We are a composite of our belongings, clothes, brands, pop culture, and devices.

What we are not is the sum of our intellectual longings or imaginative observations. We are effectively forced to kill that playful part of us while still in our teens as society asks us to be serious and accept the pain of existence.

Yet, we are the ones who make existence difficult. We allow the perpetuation of turning play into toil; we do it by telling the young person they must turn away from fun and games and start to reconcile that they will now focus on work. Homework, classwork, yard work, chores – these are a kind of punishment, a penance for existing. It is behavioral conditioning that follows us through our lives. Think about it: how we describe “Rolling up our sleeves and facing the hard work ahead” as though we may not return or at least we may suffer for our efforts.

Learning, playing, creating, and experiencing that offer delight should be our daily reward for breathing. The archaic conditioning of outmoded industrial structural dominance that has governed us needs to be cast off. We must start to bring the subconscious mind forward and return to play.

The constant complaining, maligning, verbal, and visceral recognition of what is wrong with the world does nothing but enforce the bitterness within ourselves and those around us. The silent resignation and acceptance of a bad situation is not a solution either. By either accepting the status quo or constantly complaining about everything, we are the ones who are filling our sandbox with cat turds of our own making.

We have to re-employ our intellect and see that we intuitively know the social, environmental, societal, and geopolitical problems that exist and then do something about them. We are a species of thinkers. We use words and other symbols to alter our world and build new visions. The writing is on the wall right in front of us; we must be willing to do the thing, to do something, something positive.

And so it is that one person shares a vision of doing something while having more than a dozen people contribute by lending their creative talents to the endeavor. I also offer my gratitude to those who have offered their money to help realize the dream of someone who is trying to help us take one more small positive step forward.

The Stage – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Theater DuNull in TimefireVR

William Shakespeare once said, “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.”

In his day, the majority of humanity experienced their stage from the perspective of the plot of land they farmed. A couple of hundred years later, the players found themselves in the cities where the stage was a factory floor. More recently, many of us found ourselves in some form of service industry performing for an audience of hungry and thirsty patrons who’d just come from a shopping spree at the mall.

The march of time, though, waits for no man or woman. Our stage is changing; it is transmogrifying.

With this change, our roles as players are going to once again be something quite different. This difference will be as significant to us as though Mr. Shakespeare had gone from witnessing his age to being teleported onto a jet flying from his merry-medieval England to 21st-century America from one day to the next.

Virtual Reality will be that disruptive. It is our new stage. And you are the player, the actor on that platform, an inhabitant of a new world. This alternative reality emerging from our imaginations is nothing less than a universe that will require our exploration. The difference with this age of discovery is that one need not be wealthy, an adventurer, or one of the lucky ones chosen to be an astronaut. All we must do is don a pair of VR glasses, have a powerful enough computer and download the app.

Some will say this will be an expensive proposition. Does anyone think it was cheap to go to the moon? Do you know that it typically costs more than $45,000 per person to go up Everest without a guarantee of reaching the top? Have you priced a penguin-watching trip in the Antarctic waters lately?

What is the value to us humans to see new things and have unimaginable experiences?

We are entering an age where almost anyone will be able to virtually participate in nearly any activity humans can dream of. The cost of entry is not free or cheap. But it’s never been free to enter the theater, eat a great meal, or travel the world. The difference is going to be that we are removing the barriers that have only allowed those of privilege to embark on humanity’s greatest adventures.

Architectural Theory – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Architecture in TimefireVR

We recently had a question posed to us by @ExplorAVR in the Twitterverse regarding how we are tackling architecture theory for community building in Hypatia. Seems like a fair question that deserves more than a Tweet back, so here it is.

Before theory comes experience.

The founder of Timefire grew up in Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, but went on to spend a decade in Europe before embarking on traveling the breadth of the United States. He pulls his inspiration from firsthand knowledge of the environments that define these lands. Forty years of observation and study formed the seed of what would be planted as the architectural cornerstone of Hypatia.

With life, we explore curiosity. From curiosity, knowledge can grow. Knowledge evolves until the wisps of wisdom alight our way.

From the historical decisions and serendipity that have built our most beloved cities to what is being written and talked about right now, these, too, are our architectural drivers. Hypatia is a reflection of what makes a city interesting and, hopefully, fun. We are taking heavy influence from the quaint corners that seem to universally delight travelers from around the world, such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Venice, Zurich, and Osaka, to name but a few.

Next up are the ten design principles for Livable Communities as identified by the American Institute of Architects: 1. Design on a Human Scale, 2. Provide Choices, 3. Encourage Mixed-Use Development, 4. Preserve Urban Centers, 5. Vary Transportation Options, 6. Build Vibrant Public Spaces, 7. Create a Neighborhood Identity, 8. Protect Environmental Resources, 9. Conserve Landscapes, 10. Design Matters.

But we alone are not the ultimate voice and curator of what drives humanity’s architectural curiosity, and so while we will have a heavy hand in the development of the first phase of Hypatia, this city will evolve, as cities do, with the help of others who contribute to the design and building of a community. Over time, even the sacred halls that were the foundation of our city will be torn down and replaced by the crush of progress.

Until that moment comes, though, we will encourage others to take inspiration from their influences and dreams to join us on the virtual canvas to paint a new reality. So grab your sketchbook, brush up on your Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Moshe Safdie, Zaha Hadid, and Tom Wright, then join us to create our virtual city from the shared vision of artists from around the globe.

Blender and Science – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Tissue in Blender

Over a year ago, we made the decision to use Blender as our primary 3D modeling and animation tool; you can read more about that here.

Today, I’ll go over some of the other factors that influenced this choice. First and foremost, the software is free. It also has the support of both Epic and Valve (important if you are a game/VR developer). Finally, it is very well-positioned for use in scientific visualization. And it is here that things can get into the weeds but are also very exciting for the scientifically inclined.

I have found over a dozen add-ons that extend and facilitate using Blender in some highly technical ways, as though 3D software wasn’t difficult enough. An “add-on” for Blender can also be seen as a plugin, a 3rd party application that hooks into the host software to deliver greater capability.

Three of these add-ons rise to the top of my list due to their ability to help Timefire build assets for our game Hypatia.

Sverchok is a procedural architecture tool that allows us to replicate forms where repetition would slow us down to a snail’s pace if we were forced to build every piece manually. Renowned architect Zaha Hadid is an expert in the field of this style of architecture, and while I have no idea what tools she uses, we can thank some programmers from Russia for giving the world this free add-on to allow all of us to explore and experiment with procedural architecture.

Animation Nodes is an add-on from Germany, with the generous support of others from around the globe, which is also free. This complex set of nodal-based tools gives the animator the power of procedural animation. An example use case for this is to animate 1000 similar on-screen objects. The artist controls the objects using node-based parameters and functions that are able to be assigned specific numeric and mathematical attributes. Repetitive tasks are thus reduced to understanding the flow of sequences that can be used to achieve the desired result of moving the objects along, say, a particular arc.

Tissue is more of an artist’s experimental friend as it relates to computational design. Originating from Italy, the add-on allows one to perform magic, or so it appears. Starting with a base mesh, the add-on “Tessellates” your objects into works of amazingly intricate works of art.

Now, on to the more esoteric add-ons. You’d better fasten your seat belt.

Whether you are studying brain sciences, atomic structures, biology, or computational fluid dynamics, there is an add-on for you. But let’s be serious: if you are a parent reading this, what is the likelihood you’ll up and decide to create some glycogen analysis visualizations? Your kids, though, should be encouraged to start learning some of these tools because multi-disciplinary education and broad knowledge are shaping up to be part of what is considered essential workplace skills. Plus, the tools are free.

To go into details about what the specific tools do would certainly weigh this blog entry down, maybe even sink it, but I will offer a hint of things.

There is BioBlender, another add-on from Italy. BioBlender provides the tools for exploring and visualizing biological molecules.

NeuroMorph is just the right gift for anyone interested in the morphometric analysis and visualization of 3D models created from electron microscopy image stacks – it, too is FREE!

Combine that with the add-on for creating dendritic structures with the aforementioned glycogen add-on, and your precocious 10-year-old will be performing Ph.D.-level brain analysis in no time.

There is also an Atomic clustering add-on, a protein data bank reader, and a tool for running building simulations so one can see how heat and air conditioning move through a structure. Maybe you are more interested in parametric anatomical modeling? There’s an add-on for that, too; it’s called PAM.

Finally, the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are able to run Blender on a 300,000-core Jaguar Supercomputer. If you are thinking that $104 million for a computer is too rich for your wallet, you could always opt for the Nvidia Digits DevBox, but I’d wait for next year’s Pascal-based unit if I were you.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about the Gwyddion add-on for importing Scanning Probe Microscopy files.

Image courtesy of Computational Design Italy

Looking For The New World – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Leo from TimefireVR

A change of astonishing magnitude is coming our way in the form of Virtual Reality. Soon we will be communicating in vastly different circumstances than most anyone could possibly imagine at this time.

For millennia, we humans have scratched our thoughts into the dirt, upon cave walls, or carved our mark on trees. We used pigments to draw on our skin and then applied them to canvases, which became part of our body of art. Communication is obviously a large part of our social natures, but I already wrote about that in a previous blog entry; click here if you care to read it.

To move any part of our dialog to a new medium that not only communicates but envelops all of our senses is placing us literally into a “New World.”

History can show us the advancements that have come with the discovery of new territories. Look to the European “discovery” of the Americas. Yes, I acknowledge that Native Americans didn’t need to be discovered, but that doesn’t change the fact that profound advancements rose out of this with serious positive changes for the world.

Humanity continued on the tradition by taking us to the North Pole with Robert Peary, rafting the unknown Colorado River system with John Wesley Powell, or flying to the moon with Neil Armstrong. These efforts I believe, are part of an instinct of people to go out and discover what’s out there.

So what’s in Virtual Reality? A new world with new planets and exotic new life is what’s “out” there! It will be up to the intrepid adventurer to look into the magical device known as the HMD, a.k.a. Head Mounted Device, a.k.a. Virtual Reality Goggles, and discover what’s to be found. If your eyes and mind are closed to finding the new, it will certainly never find you. Look hard and watch out because something is about to happen in our journey of discovery.

Blender – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

Gas Mask Amsterdam in TimefireVR

We here at Timefire made a choice more than a year ago to use Blender as our primary 3D modeling tool, thanks in large part to Jonathan Williamson. Jonathan came to my mind yesterday because of an article he wrote on Medium titled “The Blender Community Would Benefit from More Business,” where he was calling for other creative professionals to bring Blender into their pipeline. I first met Jonathan at SIGGRAPH 2012 in Los Angeles, where he was supporting the Blender Foundation by demoing the software. The developers had recently integrated sculpting into the package, and I was amazed at just how solid Blender had become. I liked it so much that I went home and tried it out again for the first time in more than ten years.

Jonathan’s impact didn’t stop there as he had also given me his card that pointed out that he was the Education Director at his company BlenderCookie, a.k.a. CGCookie. Their website was loaded with the best Blender tutorials I’d ever come across. It wasn’t long after that when things got going for virtual reality. It was becoming apparent I was going to join the renewed push for VR and that it just might make it big this time.

When starting up a small company outside of the California epicenter of tech innovation, entrepreneurs are often held back by a severe restriction on resources, or they’re smart enough to know where to save money so they can better invest in human capital! Imagining I might grow to a dozen developers and thinking that the majority would have to have some familiarity with 3D software, I could either budget $38,500 for Autodesk tools or I could use Blender, which is FREE.

New hires groaned. They had learned Maya or 3DS Max in college. I gave them a choice: stay in your barista/tech support/call center job or watch some of these tutorials and see if you can learn Blender. I reassured them that Blender was the least of their worries since I’d also be asking them to learn Unreal Engine, 3D-Coat, Substance Designer and Painter, maybe some coding, a bit of acting, or whatever other work that would come along in order for us to build a virtual world.

So far our relationship with Blender has mostly worked out great, and usually, if we find something missing or not functioning just so, we can interact with the developers to see a solution in the next release or add-on. Speaking of, an international community of Blender volunteers cranks out some fantastic add-ons such as Jonathan’s own Retopoflow, Jacques Lucke with Animation Nodes, Nikitron with Sverchok, BoolTool from Vitorbalbio, and most recently, Tissue by Alessandro Zomparelli. From Russia to Brazil and Kansas to Italy, there are people from around the world who are helping to make Blender better every day.

We are one of the companies using this powerful tool known as Blender. It’s responsible for all the models in the image above. Sure, it was at times difficult to get our animations into Unreal, the implementation of FBX can make you curse like a pirate, and learning all the new shortcuts can initially hamper productivity, but through it all, we are building our virtual city of Hypatia with one of the greatest pieces of free software that can empower anyone to build VR. Special thanks to Ton Roosendaal because he’s the guy who saved Blender from disappearing to Campbell Barton, who is apparently a code magician, and to Bastien Montagne, Dalai Felinto, Joshua Leung, Antony Riakiotakis, Jonathan Williamson, Sergey Sharybin, and everyone else who are all helping to make Blender the professional tool it’s becoming.

A New Species – TimefireVR

JWise TimefireVR

VR Fish

Scientists have recently verified a genetic mutation first identified in 2006 from a random sampling of newborns as a significant enough anomaly to warrant claiming a new species of humanity has emerged. Walking among us today may be a species of humans that could be our replacements.

These findings have been kept secret for nearly a decade due to the fear that the release of such information could cause widespread hysteria. The discovery has been held from public knowledge as authorities and the scientific community sought to understand the larger implications for society.

For many, the first question would be, “If humans were showing signs of evolutionary change, would anyone be able to shield it from the public eye?”

The simple answer is there isn’t any physical mutation or visual differentiation that would allow us to easily spot the carriers of the new mutation in the way we would be able to distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals. There are NO outward differences that enable us to identify this new species of man and woman.

After years of research, the mutation appears to have started following the early years of the second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1900), but possibly not until the 1940s did the process gain momentum. For millennia, our species IQ has been slowly growing with some estimates suggesting it took close to 100,000 years for our intelligence to move from an apelike IQ of about 50 to something around 70 by 1900. Today, the average IQ of an American is about 100. In one percent of the time, humanity’s average intelligence went up 150%. Most of this gain has been post-World War II, along with our incredible gains in technology.

Following the Enlightenment of the 18th century, we humans entered a period of great intellectual advancement in medicine, chemistry, physics, communication, art, work, and ideas of freedom. The ensuing two hundred years were tumultuous and filled with war due to the social and structural norms that were being broken down due to humanity’s encounter with greater intellectual capacity. Stark and dramatic changes due to innovation were convulsing society.

It is now theorized that the forces that have propelled the evolutionary changes that had us diverging from a common ape ancestor and evolving from ancestral species such as Homo Erectus and Heidelbergensis along with failed side branches such as Neanderthalensis, Denisovans, and Floresiensis are still at work and producing a new version of us Hominins.

One possible explanation of how the mutation occurred is that it could have originated from some not-yet-understood communicative relationship between our brains and DNA. It is as though our species’ genetic code was somehow able to foresee and anticipate the social implications of our intellectual advancements and, in some way, understand where humanity would take knowledge. The idea that our DNA or some other biological mechanism can then direct gene expression and alter our very humanity to favor certain characteristics is certainly in the realm of what we thought until now was science fiction.

When we humans moved away from our hunter-gatherer roots and entered an agrarian age, we started to rapidly develop technology, allowing us to alter the lives of plants and head down a path of animal husbandry to domesticate particular animals. While this knowledge served us well for 10,000 years, it was with the approach of the modern era that we would see the greatest acceleration of change.

Nearly right up to modern times, people who lived on the margins of Earth in primitive cultures were seen as contemptible and just as often worthless. As such, they were taken into slavery and or pushed off their ancestral lands in order to make way for progress. For many years, our ancestors didn’t believe that these “barbarians and primitives” were even related to the modern enlightened figure who was thrusting culture and economy forward.

Fast forward to today, and we see the exchange of information and economy on a global scale with no end in sight. People have been culturally and racially integrating while accepting the rapidly changing social views that are coming with the dawn of distributed knowledge. And it is this word, knowledge, that is the underpinning of our current evolutionary trajectory.

Knowledge was and is the only tool our species can possess that might allow life to move into the Universe. If we were to remain warlike, full of hatred and intolerance, we could theoretically extinct ourselves before intelligent life had the opportunity to move forward with its ultimate instinctual goal – the propagation of life.

Many on Earth now recognize the vestiges of this ancestral predecessor and are trying to repair their violent mistakes with steps to alleviate the damage inflicted upon our environment and other species. This change of attitude and action is likely originating in this new species of humans.

This information is starting to leak out now because the mutation is widespread enough that no attempt to destroy it will be effective. In all corners of the Earth, we are seeing the appearance of this new form of man and woman. We might recognize them as they embrace complexity and strive for social cohesion.

Their immediate ancestors were the scientists, mathematicians, doctors, programmers, and politicians who paved the way for everything from rocketry, MRI, smartphones, the Internet, and, yes, Virtual Reality. The possible first generation of these new people has already retired, with the second generation in their working prime soon, though the largest wave of new humans will wrest control from the dominant but self-extincting earlier species of man and begin to take the helm of guiding humanity.

Some might worry that as the older version of humanity recognizes they are being pushed aside, they will rebel and attempt to kill off the new type of human being. However, this kind of backlash may not be feasible, as the new version cannot be distinguished from the old.

Our forebears had to look identical as in all likelihood, the current dominant species would have attempted to extinct it if it could identify it, especially if it posed a threat to people and their way of life.

Nature appears to be putting to rest the part of the hominin species that brought us the Stone Age and fought our battles. The next version of humans might be called Homo Intelligens, and their coming era and beyond could be one of social, almost hive-like cooperation that could propel thought and culture deep into the Universe as we find our way off of our planet and into the cosmos.

If you would like to know who they are, you can find them scattered around our Earth. Often, the genetic mutation has been triggered in the children of average people, and no one can yet see just how different they will grow up to be. There are hundreds of millions of them. They will be known for their ease of moving into complexity. They are hugely social and accepting of cultural differences while being wary of people stuck in outdated modes of thought and intolerance. In the 1970’s we likely got our first real glimpse of them as a growing population when they became computer programmers and engineers and ushered in the age of communication.

Without them now humanity would possibly cease to exist as there are simply too many people on Earth that must be fed, clothed, housed, their waste eliminated, their cities maintained, electricity distribution, and communication systems kept humming.

Humanity is at a crossroads where it must choose to embrace the coming radical social upheaval that will accompany our shift from one human species to another. One that doesn’t share the same cultural norms, religion, and antiquated forms of behavior of the group it is leaving behind. Or the aggression still inherent in our dominant species, who inherited their warlike violent tendencies from long-separated ape ancestors, will drive them to declare war on humanity and cause our demise.

“They will be known by the masks they wear on their faces, and you will find them in Virtual Reality. Their secret society will be invisible unless you know just where to look. They are shaping our future; they will be walking among us in Hypatia.”