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Madelaine McMasters

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Everything posted by Madelaine McMasters

  1. Madelaine McMasters
    Blame the milliner? I'm gonna keep an eye on you, Dyna.
  2. Madelaine McMasters
    Dad was very sensitive to the line between patriotism and jingoism, and found that airshows often crossed it.
  3. Madelaine McMasters
    Okay Dyna, I have a peeve, or more accurately, a question. Is the decoration on your hat on the right hand side, or in front? I can convince myself it's either, with perhaps a slight bias to the right. It's sometimes the case that the side on which we wear something has some significance, like the Hanky Code. Without being sure just where your hat's adornment is located, I can’t even begin to know if it peeves me, let alone just what kind of peeve it should elicit. I impatiently await your response.
  4. Madelaine McMasters
    My father flew a F4U (which he happily and swearily pronounced) Corsair in WWII. That plane was nicknamed the "Whistling Death". I still marvel at the graceful motion of those death machines, in what might be the epitome of irony. When I learned to fly, and was finally able to take up a passenger, Dad was the first to enlist. I offered him the wheel, but he demurred. There was heartbreak in that for me. A thing he had loved to do had been poisoned by war and could not, for him, be redeemed. He came along to witness my innocent joy.
  5. Madelaine McMasters
    Let this be an invitation to anyone and everyone to air your grievances. All I ask is that the expression of your complaint mask your intention well enough that there can be significant misunderstanding.
  6. Madelaine McMasters
    And if not being able to discuss side topics is a pet peeve?
  7. Madelaine McMasters
    I live on the shore of Lake Michigan. Half of my daily view is "just" the Lake Michigan horizon. Most people who visit my place will say "Oh, that's such a beautiful view, but don't you get tired of it?". Meanwhile, I walk out to the bluff almost every day to look at that horizon. Though there are similarities across the thousands of times I've soaked in that view, I always find something interesting to ponder. That might be a cargo ship or a sail out on the horizon, a duck diving for seaweed, or bats scooping up dragonflies (not fireflies, if those poisonous little devils are out, the bats steer clear of them). I make a point each day to look up at the sky. Again, I always find something interesting to ponder. I watch for variance between the breeze on my skin and the winds aloft, as evidenced by the movement of clouds. I watch contrails to gauge humidity and look for the shadows of clouds in the clouds near sunrise/sunset. Though two views of the sky, a year apart, might be nearly identical, I always learn something in the intervening year that makes my perception happily different.
  8. Madelaine McMasters
    It is complicated, and I both create and enjoy the creations of others. I built my outdoor theater with a mix of other's creations (projector, screen, landscape lighting, etc) of my own (pergola) and nature's (landscaping/woods). I'll be showing "Dr. Strangelove", my favorite creation by Stanley Kubrick and a few quirky shorts as a way of sharing my sensibilities with others. I am something of a perfectionist, so the prospect of infinite time is appealing to me. I would not (I think?) be happy living in a home I did not well understand, and could not modify. I hated renting and wasn't terribly thrilled living in a home with someone who was happy to hire out things we could do ourselves. Can you imagine living with me, forever? That's a powerful argument for mortality.
  9. Madelaine McMasters
    You really just don't get it, do you? I've been thinking about this as I prepare for "movie night" on my patio this evening. My RL home was manageable for the three people that lived in it for decades. With only me remaining, it's become borderline. I contemplate selling it and building something new and smaller, that reflects my current sensibilities. But, I know how long it took to get this place "just so" and I don't know if I want to be taking on a massive start over given my remaining time. If I were immortal, I'd have no qualms about changing things up, as I'd always have infinite time to enjoy the fruits of a finite expenditure of time and effort. If the only constant is change, I want lots of time for it.
  10. Madelaine McMasters
    And now I'm thinking of Woody Allen... I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment. ETA: If the "wisest" mortals are not afraid of dying, would the wisest immortals not be afraid of living forever? The inevitable is inevitable, why fear it?
  11. Madelaine McMasters
    I'd have all the time in the world to make my own things!
  12. Madelaine McMasters
    I've been alive for 52 years and can't recall a boring moment. If everyone's immortal, nobody outlives anybody. If we all just keep learning (that's a huge "if"), I think we could keep boredom at bay. Yeah, we'd all be looking into the abyss of the heat death of the universe, but is that any different than a 20 year old looking at death in 60 years? I enjoy hypothesizing as much as the next person, but I find most of the immortality tropes hopelessly limited by our mortal imaginations. I'm now thinking of a favorite line from Laurie' Anderson's song "Language is a Virus". Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.
  13. Madelaine McMasters
    I wonder. Stuck with mortality, do we find ways to make immortality unappealing so we won't miss it? Like the child who exclaims "I hate ice-cream!" after dropping their cone on the sidewalk? I have been able to learn something new seemingly every day since my birth. If that could continue forever and as free of pain as I have been so far, count me in! This is, of course, a terribly complex hypothetical. If immortality were possible, I'd not be the only one seeking it. That's a problem! I once heard the head of the CDC (IIRC) claiming that the first person to become 200 years old was alive today. He waxed ebullient about that prospect, but I immediately saw some problems... China's one-child policy re-implemented world wide, to reduce overcrowding. Politicians running for their 135th term in office. Applying for a job in competition with someone with 120 years of seniority. Losing your job to a 30 year old "kid" who's steeped in the current state-of-the-art. Having to earn continuing education credits for over 100 years. Eight generations of one family living under the same roof, with only the 50 year old generation earning good money. Trying to remember 200 years of life experience with a brain that evolved to hold 60. I'm sure you can imagine more downside. So, would I want to live forever? Under the right circumstances? Yep! Under the wrong? Nope!
  14. Madelaine McMasters
    I don't think SL has the concept of "collision bones" as I've described them (a definition I learned 30 years ago when in grad school, and which might no longer be in use). As I learned it, "bones" are lines (coded by two end points), representing the simplest description of a solid link in the animation armature/skeleton. In recognition of the physical limits of joints in a real body, the virtual joints have some limits on their motion. That prevents obviously impossible bone positions (backwards knee bends) but doesn't prevent collisions. I think this is the current state of the SL avatar skeleton. It's a collection of lines, connected by hinges having motion limits. (I know there are limits in the various posing systems we use. I don't know if there are limits in the SL animation system that reads the pose data.) The first step in collision prevention is to give the bones some crude, rigid shape. Those were (and maybe still are) called "collision bones". They're approximations, but require only modest computation to prevent the most egregious self clipping. A physical realization of a collision bone system would be the wooden 3-D mannequin you showed earlier in the thread. The next step above that was "collision mesh/skin". Instead of collision bones, the animation system uses a simple rigged mesh wrapped around the skeleton, to more accurately reflect the visible shape of the avatar and the soft tissue deformations that occur as a result of joint movement, but ignoring deformation due to collision. Such systems do a better job of preventing clipping, but don't model the skin deformations that actually occur during a collision, such as dimpling of fleshy areas when poked by a finger or a rigid object. The next step above that is to compute deformations of the collision mesh by contact with other portions of the mesh (or other meshes). At this point, computation complexity soars, but soft tissues will dimple under "pressure" from a colliding object. As the realism of the collision modeling system improves, it becomes increasingly important to incorporate avatar specific modifications, such as the full character skin mesh and the geometry of clothing and attachments. Ultimately, collision systems understand the behavior of skin, clothing, hair, worn objects, and the entirety of the world the avatar moves through (solid objects, flexible objects, clouds of smoke, ad infinitum). I'm not familiar with VRchat, but you've described something that's at least at the "collision bone" level. I think SL would benefit from a system as simple as "collision bones". Given the wide variety of even just human avatar shapes, the system might want to query at least the shape slider settings to adjust the geometry of collision bones. The further an avatar deviates from human proportions, the worse this will work. I'm more excited about puppeteering bringing some form of collision handling than I am about live mocap control of avatars. We'll all benefit from some collision handling.
  15. Madelaine McMasters
    I thought Helen's use "representation of Self" was pretty clear. What leads you to think she was referring to the uncanny valley effect? How do you imagine that would affect our behavior? I spend a significant portion of my in-world time as a little devil, or a particle cloud of decaying morality. I don't think there's much the SL rendering system could do to make those representations any more cannily uncanny than they already are. I think a lot of people use SL to present aspects of their self image they are unable to show in RL, for various reasons. I'm one of them.
  16. Madelaine McMasters
  17. Madelaine McMasters
    ...starts a little campfire outside your fort, leaves a bag of marshmallows and some long sticks, then hides behind a tree until you let your guard down and come out* *little devils eat force fields for breakfast
  18. Madelaine McMasters
    I'd put on a few pounds if I thought it would help me fill a bra. That look is way on the far side of anything I've ever wanted.
  19. Madelaine McMasters
    I'd want to use it as a Zamboni.
  20. Madelaine McMasters
    Well then, may I presume that this is really not your look?
  21. Madelaine McMasters
    I forgot the main point I wanted to make in my previous post. I very much look forward to handling of collisions, even if only in the animation of individual avatars. I can't tell whether this is something that will be handled within SL, or if the expectation is that the external capture systems will clean up collisions before sending the data to the system. I'd love to see (if it's even remotely possible) the ability to massage existing poses and animations in a way that eliminates the "voodoo surgery"* we all do on ourselves. I've less hope of LL addressing the surgery we do on each other. *the removal of internal organs, simply by reaching a hand into the body cavity
  22. Madelaine McMasters
    Recognizing collisions is step one. Doing something visually acceptable to address them is step two. The LL announcement Nalate's linked doesn't get into much detail, so I don't know if/how collisions will be handled. It does seem that the focus is on real-time mocap, which I am not personally interested in. It might also be that collisions are to be handled by the external mocap system, which could mean that body sliders do not affect animations (and therefore can't be used to prevent collisions), or would have to be exported from SL to inform the external mocap system. We'll see how it goes when we see how it goes.
  23. Madelaine McMasters
    SL is my social media.
  24. Madelaine McMasters
    Yep. In primitive skeleton animation systems, the bones are just lines, which can't really collide because they have no volume. The SL skeleton has some limits on joint angles, derived from basic human limits, like not being able to bend our legs backwards at the knee without a trip to the ER. Those limits don't prevent setting several joint angles in such a way that body parts collide. By giving the bones some simply shaped collision volume (which would respond to the sliders, so you can adjust for thin/thick people), it's possible to compute approximately when they collide. You'd allow overlap in some cases (elbow creases) but not others (fingertips against anything), simply because humans are squishy, but you don't have to go through the horrific calculations of deforming a complex mesh to simulate contact. We're not looking for perfection, we're just trying to avoid entire hands vanishing into our (or someone else's) abdomen. Inherent in such a system is some knowledge of human motion that allows a collision to be "unwound" in a visually acceptable way. If a pose puts my hand through my chest, I don't want the system to fold my hand backwards at a gasp inducing angle to fix that. I want it to move at least my upper and lower arms as well, in some way that looks plausible.
  25. Madelaine McMasters
    Though I mentioned the disabled as potentially suffering from the introduction of puppeteering, I don't actually have much concern about that happening. I'm able bodied, yet prefer using a keyboard to drive SL. I have no interest in my avatar reflecting my RL movement, even just facial expressions. I am not alone. I would be interested in a system that efficiently converts explicit commands (voice, keyboard/mouse, or some easy to use interface) into facial expressions and movements, smoothly transitioning and merging with libraries of animations. I want this system to understand context, so I'm not burdened with endless detailed specification in my commands. I don't see puppeteering affecting the animations market. Animation creators have been using mocap for many years. They'll take advantage of any improvements in the SL avatar animation system to creat better products we can use pretty much as we always have. Far into the future, I can imagine AI "assistants" gathering information from us with the intent to infer animations from whatever input we give the system, whether text, voice, mocap, disabled access devices or other affordances. Such a system might see me type (or hear me say) "set @animats on fire" and instantly animate my avatar launching a fireball at him while creating a matching chat emote. If there is a peril here, it's that some users will puppeteer their avatars live, in some way that distinguishes them from the rest of us. This will start with performers, but spread to enthusiasts. If they seek each other out, this might begin to feel as voice regions currently do to typists like me.
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