Archive for the ‘Skytemple’ Category
Augmented Reality
The Future is Now
Augmented Reality, or computer mediated reality, is already all around us. Although we may not be able to buy The Terminator’s glasses or Jordy LaForge’s ocular implants, the world of fully immersive computer mediated experiences that blend the real world and the digital are not far off.
At a recent brainstorming session, we talked about the promises and pitfalls of this emerging technology as well as some of our own ideas on the possibilities of Augmented Reality. To give some focus to our vision, we each created cards describing the features that could come out of this emerging technology.
Check out the photos on Facebook
A Little History
Augmented Reality could be said to have it’s roots in a famously abandoned technology of the early computer revolution, Virtual Reality. Speculators ranging from Timothy Leary to William Gibson had dreams of building fully immersive 3d virtual worlds. Suits encased the user literally in bulky helmets and gloves, sometimes full body suits – and at their most extreme, buckled harnesses attached to human sized centrifugal hoops designed to free the user from the bounds of gravity. Unfortunately the dream exceeded the technology of the time. Virtual Reality never took off in large part because computers able to handle the amount of raw data needed to continuously render convincing interactive 3d worlds simply was too expensive and cumbersome for the average consumer.
Augmented Reality became a kind of middle ground. A staging area where the ideas and techniques of a virtual interactive 3d world could be tested by mixing them with real world objects and locations. On one end, exhaustive and exacting GPS coordinating became possible enabling geolocation accuracy down to a few feet and closing every day.
The real world was mapped and digested into numbers and fed into computers all over the world, creating a exhaustive, immense, and self-perpetuating mosaic of a world more detailed than the most thorough fantasy realm. The advance of personal portable computers in the form of PDAs and Smart phones has given rise to an already existing unseen virtual world growing up all around us. Best of all this virtual world is hosted in an ever expanding wireless web; cloud computing is slowly but surely breaking down the limitations of storage capacity and information access.
On the other hand, immersive multiplayer virtual worlds have grown both in popularity and sophistication. Two examples being the ever prevalent World of Warcraft (just one of many online communities who’s virtual economic system has grown so large and complex that it has given rise to cottage industries of ‘gold farmers’ who buy and trade virtual items for real world currency) and the recently released Skyrim, which has dazzled audiences and critics with it’s level of immersion and sophistication. In the last few years however, each of these splintered fields has been increasingly linked to create powerful applications which overlay the virtual world onto the physical.
The Writing On The Wall
One of the most familiar uses of Augmented Reality is in sports. Many people are familiar with the yellow ‘first down’ line in Football which appears to actually be painted on the field but is really generated by computer in real time, but many other sports use the technology to display advertising on empty playing field walls.
Applications on Android and iPhones can supply a kind of computer-mediated vision of the world. Some display simple things such as maps and information about surrounding points – all with the aid of location-identifying GPS coordinators, while others directly overlay the position of the planetary bodies, stars, and satellites, or real-time special effects such as laser blasts and explosions. While these early uses of Augmented reality may seem, at their best, like simple expansions on existing technologies, and at their worst gimmicky novelties, AR has the very real potential to change everything about how humans interact with the world. From advertising to architecture there is nothing off limits to AR.
As computers creep from the desk, to our pockets, weaving into our very clothes and perhaps some day our flesh, the question has become not when, but how computers will mediate our lives. Will AR be used to supplant reality with a “better” version, to cover walls with virtual ads and fantastic vistas, or will it be used to enhance reality, to visualize once invisible depth and dimension to our the Real World User Experience?
Art as Ritual – An Interview With Megan LaBonte
“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Everyday Magic
Many people swear by certain rituals to their art, certain music they have to listen to in order to create, certain times of day they have to work, or even certain shoes they have to wear. Some artists, however, know the mere act of art itself as a kind of ritual; a way for each of us to rent the fabric of the ordinary and transform our everyday life.
Since the dawn of humankind, art has served to heighten the experience of everything it touches from our most holy rituals to our most mundane of tasks. From the ancient shamanistic cave paintings on the walls of our ancestral homes, intended to inject magical visages to prehistoric gatherings, to the war paint of celtic tribes to the ceremonial feathers adorning Native American warriors, art has been used for countless centuries to transform the world – to bridge the gap between the physical realm and the realm of ideas
Holidays are the best place to look for the ways the ritual of art transforms our world. Christmas finds us adorning sprawling living room totems in hopes of a joyful season. Without the baubles and decorations, the cards and wreaths hung from our walls each December, Christmas would lose much of it’s essence. Art as ritual creates the season. Halloween allows us to escape even ourselves for one night, by literally transforming ourselves with masks and garments which normally exist only in our individual or collected imaginations in the form of costumed heroes and villains from myth, legend, and more modern media.
Through The Looking Glass
One local artist has been exploring these very themes all her life. Megan LaBonte – who many Valley residents may already know as, “The Hoola-Hoop Girl,” a moniker Ms LaBonte picked up in the early aughts for her public impromptu Hoola-Hoop parties on the steps of the First Congressional on Main, has spent the last decade exploring the boundaries between art and life, most notably with her installation pieces placed in Northampton shop windows in which she turned blank white mainline heads into exquisitely detailed fantastical faces. This last year however, Ms LaBonte took the plunge, emerging her world in an everyday ritual to produce images of worlds which exist right on top of our own.
The 366 Program asks artist to take a picture of themselves every day for a year (in this case a leap year hence the 366). This seemingly simple task has blossomed into a treasure trove of opportunities for Ms LaBonte to explore reoccurring themes such as nature and the woods, femininity and sexuality to name just a few. Each day she uses her camera to become a kind of portal, allowing her each day a moment to transcend the every day. One day may find her transformed with brightly colored scales rippling across her face, while another a satyr deep in a green wood complete with horns and elven ears.
In the following podcast interview with Megan LaBonte, I discuss her ongoing 366 project, her past work and touch on some of the ideas discussed above.
Megan LaBonte-interview by Skytemple
View more of Ms LaBonte’s work at her online gallery here.
Re: Skytemple – The Office Redesign
We Escaped From a Doomed Existence in the Cubes and You Can Too!
For years, the cubicle loomed large before the office landscape. It’s sleek partitioned workspaces exemplified simplicity of construction and design. The cubicle seemed, at least from an engineering standpoint, the pinnacle of efficiency. A beehive of number crunchers. The cubicle dominated the modes of social interactions and locked the white collar worker in a maze of office tedium. Yet, workers lamented it’s imposing nature, television shows, movies and books, all bemoaned it’s existence, their characters trapped as if mice in a vast impossible corporate maze.
Studies have shown that an office’s design has a direct effect on on job satisfaction, productivity and profitability, yet many employers do not consider creating productive workspaces for their employees a priority. A study from 2006 reported that 90% of respondents thought “their office space affected their attitudes about work and that a different setup could make their companies more competitive.”
Inception
The Skytemple office began as the apartment of our CEO Curtiss Hayden. Furnished with futons, a couch, and dressers we needed to turn this living space into a working space. What was once a fine bachelor pad became an office. Decorations came down, furniture was removed, and Ikea yoga was practiced.
It was quite obvious the design wasn’t working for us and consensus was reached, if the design isn’t working, change the design.
Conception
We needed a way to draw our team together, to get discussion and ideas flowing. We wanted to utilize the wall space. We already had a number of white boards and sticky note filled bulletin boards but the general flow of the room was a mess. Cluttered and disorganized, we started by removing the clutter.
Reception
With all the empty wall space someone hit on the the idea of buying a projector to give more visual focus to our meetings and discussions. Most of what we did in the office was computer based so working in tandem could sometimes be tricky.
As it turned out, the introduction of the projector was key. Once We established the common viewing wall, the layout of the desks and tables flowed naturally, They pushed back and bundled up around each other. We became a huddled team.
Meeting became much more dynamic. Clients and teammates no longer had to huddle around tiny screens. Projects became full sized creations, and the viewing experience took on a group experience. Weeks of back and forth e-mails became quick group hashing sessions.
As Mel, one of our designers put it, “I love having things geared around the projector. That has definitely upped our productivity and has been a great asset in the WordPress meetups we sometimes hold here.”
Evolution
So, a few simple (and free) changes helped us really supercharge our workflow and increased turnaround time. Setting up a better strategy for meetings and clearing out the clutter helped us organize and clear out our heads as well. And the inexpensive addition of the projector brought focus and cohesion to our discussions.
An office redesign can be a simple cheap and incredibly effective tool for breathing fresh vigor into a stagnant workplace or help relieve stress in an already busy office. You don’t have to learn Feng Shui to come up with ideas to open your offices work space and give your employees room the breath and a space to collaborate. As Jason put it, “When you understand the flow of thought and action, you can optimize the space to improve productivity.”
Local Designer Scout Cuomo Talks Etsy, Self Promotion and Taking Chances
Brave New Art World
The artist’s life is uncertain to say the least. The artist, by nature, operates in a world removed of the practical restrictions of the everyday. The painter chooses the color pallet with which to paint their sunset, free -if they choose- of the restrictions of what others see. Many people use art as an escape – a way to get away from the practical problems that sometimes seem insurmountable. Art allows us to imagine impossible ways to do just that. The artist is bound only by their imagination.
But selling art is a different beast. The ups and down of the public’s whim and fancy often dictate what design or painting sells from week to week. Making money sculpting or painting whatever one fancies does not often pay the bills. In the past, the artist might look to a gallery owner or private patron to fund their art. Much of Western culture’s finest early art was paid for by private donors for private courses. Painting of kings and family of royalty or commissions from the church. But much of the artist’s work, including often the style itself, was dictated by these patrons.
Today however, in a kind of ultimate democratization – just as sovereignty is now each citizen’s responsibility, so is, patronage. And the modern incarnation of democratized patronage is the internet. Now the artist is their own sales team, their own reviewer, their own accountant, their own banker. The artist is freed from the restrictions of suits interfering with ‘pure art’ but they are also forced to take into their own hands the mechanisms of the marketplace which many purists in the past have considered vulgar.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with local designer and artist, Scout Cuomo. Scout has been running an Etsy shop for a number of years from her apartment. Etsy allows her to sell her art work and design goods in a free environment online, while still providing technical support and a platform for advertising. Ultimately, however, everything in her store is hers. And, beside the minimal transaction fees, the money never has to go through a third party vendor.
Etsy shops have become a very popular way for people to sell everything from homemade pottery to hand knitted mittens to prom dresses to fine art.
In the following interview, held at the Haymarket, I spoke with Scout about the difficulties of balancing the artist with the business person.
Scout Cuomo on Her Art, Self Promotion and more. by Skytemple
VISIT SCOUT’S ETSY STORE TO PURCHASE ANY OF THESE ITEMS OR BROWSE LOTS MORE HERE
Skytemple is Hiring!
Fun, creative local digital agency seeks excellent communicator with a background in the design & development field to focus on billing and bookkeeping.
The candidate will be responsible for the following:
- invoice clients
- manage accounts payable
- coordinate with clients and project managers
- track services and client relations
- improvement of invoice strategy
The ideal candidate will possess the following skills:
- familiarity with financial software and bookkeeping
- organization online and in-office (folders, contracts, agreements, etc.)
- logic and process engineering
- articulate and personable
- ambition, vision and a sense of humor
Send demonstrations of these phenomenal traits in your response, along with your resume, to info (at) skytemple.com. This is a part-time position with room for growth with the right person.
Many thanks. We can’t wait to meet you.
