How Videogames Blind Us With Science

I'm sure that there's a lot of people out there in the world with a great undiscovered potential to beeing something out of the ordinary. It could be a great dancer, muscican or maybe a great scientist, but an outdated school system which doesn't adapt and society's expectations for everyone to fit into its standardized model keep them from ever discover their potiential. Or in the worst case just scare them away from it. Sir Ken Robinson have a really interesting talk about this on Ted talks where one of his points is that too many today that doesn't go along well in a classroom situation is diagnosed with ADD and put on medications..

Today I found this article on wired.com which is somewhat onto the same problem. Kids are playing games, spending hours and days working on Excel spreadsheets, doing calculations etc. to get understand and better at the game they're playing (understanding the underlaying rules of the game). These are often the same kids that tunes out of science classes in school - even tho they're actually doing science when playing the games. So if school would adapt to these kids who knows if they'd maybe pick up one or another future great scientist?

Full article here :)

The creative gap

I just came across this video from Ira Glass. I don't know much about the guy, but I found it to be a nice inspirational video. He talks a bit about how everyone creative has to go through that phase where your ideas are great, but the result is not as great as you want it to be. There's a gap that needs to be filled.

I must say I still feel like I'm in the middle of the gap somewhere. From my last job working in a large studio setting it didn't matter as much because you're only a small part of a large team who together will bring up the quality of the product, but the last year where I've been a "one man army" in a new company I started out having a big gap between my expectations to myself and the products I could deliver. On the other hand I've never learned so much in a such sort time, so beeing put in this situation has had it clear advantages too!

Well, enough talk.. here's the video. Enjoy! :)

Aaaand ... Joan of Arc again

Finally got to work some more on her. Not too often I have time for these personal projects - or rather, I have time, but after 7-8 hours daily at work with 3D it's not always that tempting to sit for another 7-8 hours at home doing exactly the same ;)

Anyways, here's some screen grabs from tonight's little modeling session. I've finished her clothes and props, so now there's just the final adjustments left before the dreadful unwrapping starts.
Still have some way to go on her face. I know it will look better once it's textured, but I really want to get rid of everything that looks alien to me. And it's not always that easy to point out what's wrong and in need of adjustment. Mainly worked on her eyes tonight. Also while watching one of the new episodes of Heroes the other day I made an especially notice of the new character Daphne, played by Brea Grant. Hehe, there's just something about that brown eyes-blonde hair combo I love.. So figured I would try to get my Joan character's face looking as hers. Oh well, aim high, right? :)
(And oh yeah; I'm fully aware she looks nothing like her right now, it's only on my to-do, or rather, to-try list! :))

The Uncanny Valley

I started watching the Discovery series I, Videogame a few days ago after been made aware of the series from a coworker who recommended it. I've only watched the two first episodes so far and the series has so far gone through the early history of video games. How it all started, the influences of the cold war etc. Quite interesting, but not that much new that I didn't already know.
But in the second episode they brought up a very interesting point. Some of today's games, especially sports games, are on the point of being hyper realistic. Details are clearer than in the real world and people react to this because while it looks very close to reality there's still something wrong about it.

This brought them on to a hypothesis called the Uncanny Valley. This is the idea that the more humanlike a robot (or CG model) becomes the more repulsive everything not 100% human about it will become. If you've seen movies like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or The Polar Express you probably know what the hypothesis is all about. Even though it looks realistic there's something non-human about it. Something alien and repulsive.
A good example of this is this video (which is pretty freaky imho :))

Anyways, I'm not going to write alot about it. I just think it's an interesting subject as a 3d-modeller and I bet I will encounter the problem on my Joan of Arc model if I take her as far as I want.

Here's also part 1 of a presentation on the subject that explains it alot better than I can do :)