by Markus Weber -

Das Problem mit Proceduralism & Eigenleistung

Die jüngsten Ereignisse bei der Entwicklung von Videospielen neigen zu immer größer und komplexer werdenden Spielwelten, in denen ein prozeduraler Workflow unumgänglich sei. Die Chancen Videospiele mithilfe von prozeduralausgelegten Workflows zukunftssicher zu machen klingt gut, doch bringen Innovationen wie diese, meist neue Risiken und Probleme mit sich. Eines dieser Probleme ist der Mangel an bestimmter menschlicher Handarbeit, der bei einer kreativen Leistung eines Künstlers automatisch in sein Werk miteinfließt. Die Eigenleistung setzt sich beim Arbeiten mit prozeduralen Algorythmen vor allem bei der Ausarbeitung der Idee und den geplanten Vorhabnissen fest – doch reicht dies aus um den Output als sein eigen zu nennen?

Sulaiman Abdul Rahman: “Think of it as an artist describing the mood or tone they want their artwork to convey and having the canvas magically come up with a painting based on that description.”

Es kann ebenso argumentiert werden, dass der Designer sich in künstlerischer und kreativer Hinsicht jederzeit über sein Handeln bewusst ist, während das prozedurale Werkzeug, beispielsweise eine Software, diesen Aspekt nicht verstehen kann. Die Software wird in diesem Fall nicht in der Lage sein, seinen eigenen “künstlerischen Touch” hinzuzufügen, wie es ein Mensch machen könnte. Während der Künstler seine Leistung erbringt, wird diese letztendlich aber immer noch von einer Maschine erstellt, welche nicht versteht, was sie eigentlich auf visueller Ebene auswirft. Jedoch ändert eine plausible Antwort auf dieses Problem nichts an der Tatsache, dass prozedurale Algorythmen Alltag in heutigen Videospielen sind – wenn auch nicht in allen Bereichen.

Beispielsweise werden Hauptfiguren (Heros) selten bis garnicht prozedural entwickelt, da jedes kleinste Detail im Aussehen einen bestimmten Grund hat. Ein gutes Beispiel hierfür ist Super Mario, der sich seit Tag 1 von Spiel zu Spiel visuell weiterentwickelt hat, bis hin zu einem für den Entwickler “perfekten” Erscheinungsbild, wie ihn die meisten von uns kennen – der rote Mützenträger mit blauer Latzhose und Schnurrbart.

“From Popeye inspirations to the style guide and to now, they and the rest of the Mario Bros. cast have remained largely consistent in personality and design. Sure there have been games that experiment with aesthetics such as the Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi series, but Nintendo seems to have found a stable character design for the famous duo and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of them changing.”

In einem früheren Blogeintrag wurde genauer auf die prozedurale Erstellung eines Hauskonstrukts eingegangen, welches mit einzelnen Klicks zu vielen unterschiedlichen Variationen eines Hauses geführt haben. Ob diese Art und Weise bei wichtigen Spielfiguren jemals anwendbar wird, ist fragwürdig, da der prozedurale Output immer mit einer kleinen Brise von Zufälligkeit verknüpft ist. Im Umkehrschluss bedeutet dies, dass Proceduralism nicht in allen Gebieten ihre Stärken voll ausspielen kann. Manchmal ist es durchaus eine klügere Entscheidung, sich für den manuellen und “langsameren” Weg zu entscheiden.

Quellen:

UBM Tech (2021): Persuasive Games: The Proceduralist Style. In: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3909/persuasive_games_the_.php?print=1 (zuletzt aufgerufen am 22.03.2021)

Rahman Abdul, Sulaiman (02.12.2019): Procedural Workflow in Video Game Art. In: https://medium.com/mighty-bear-games/procedural-workflow-in-video-games-art-79162a911265 (zuletzt aufgerufen am 22.03.2021)

by Yasaman Eskandari -

Intercultural Communications 8

This Blog Post is about finding daily details in Austrian and Iranian lives and how they have designed in different cultures. I suppose the book “die eigenen vier Wände” from Gert Selle has a significant influence on writing this post. This book is about analyzing houses, doors, walls, windows and some other factors and their meanings. For example, doors play a role as a border between two different spaces. People always go through doors and do not make a long pause there. When you enter your home and you close the main door, you enter to a new environment, where could have a total different vibe as outside. In one house, they can also separate different environments from one another and play a border roll. There are some pictures from doors in Iran and Austria placed next to each other for a very simple design and meaning comparison.

  • Front Door in Austria
  • Front Door in Iran
  • Front Door in Iran
  • Front Door in Iran
  • Front Door in Iran
  • Front Door in Austria
  • Front Door in Austria

As you see in these traditional pictures, the main form and purpose of these doors are the same, however the way they have designed and how people interacted with details differ significantly in both cultures.

  • Typical window of a house in a small town in Austria. Home in the Austrian city of St Wolfgang in a rainy day. Retro style

Windows are a view to the outside world. People can stand by a window and observe the outside world meanwhile they are physically inside their own world, better to say, inside the safe area of their homes. One of the most surprising experiences for me was that people in the western world, open their windows and they do not have a fear of getting noticed from people outside in addition, privacy has a total different meaning. As you can see in the right picture from an Iranian window from Qajar historical period, they are closed and just play a small role bringing a little light inside, however these windows also only existed in the inside small garden and not on the street. I can relate this matter to islamic believes and not to let women and family getting seen from the outside. Nowadays we have wider windows and this topic has been changed a lot, but still every apartment has a curtain and people do not open their windows as often as in Europe.

During the search about details, I found an animation movie about two houses. I found the story and technic very nice and the way two houses from two different cities become best friends. This animation demonstrates the concept of the similarity between houses and human beings in a very beautiful way as well as making questions about feeling at home or are we the houses?

by Yasaman Eskandari -

Intercultural Communications 6

The challenge learning European names and remembering them was not easy for me at the beginning. However still it is not easy for European people understanding and saying my name. I found a very interesting Austrian animation that also is about the names. Watching these animation, gave me the idea about writing this blog post and have a quick thought about the importance of the names. The story is about a man who is not satisfied with his name and he wants to change his name. It is a short animation which has been made very interesting with a very nice design.

This animation has been made by Benjamin Swiczinsky. He studied at Filmakademie_Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. The technic and character design is very inspiring for me. The music suits the animation very well.

Poeple’s names also differ in different cultures. There are different trends for naming new born children from time to time which also could be a possibility getting more information about the society. I have found an interesting list about Austrian names. Almost no body has these names in Iran, however I am very happy that I know most of these names now.

Iranians have very old names. However after entering Islam, people started naming their children islamic names as well as old Persian names. Nowadays people mostly use old Iranian names showing the concept of “getting back to the roots”. There is also even a historical name changing. On the Nowruz of 1935, Reza Shah asked foreign delegates to use the Persian term Iran (meaning the land of Aryans in Persian), the endonym of the country, in formal correspondence. Subsequently, the common adjective for citizens of Iran changed from Persian to Iranian. Another example are these names with their meanings that I have found from Disney website.

https://family.disney.com/baby-names/persian-names/

by Viktoria Rest -

Branded content

Branded content is a form of creating brand stories that have a non-product or non-service focussed storyline. The brand itself and the values are the focus of the message. 

In times where it’s more and more important as a brand to tell a unique story, the mainstream channels were to reach consumers are outdated. The audience, that is forced to watch tv commercials is about to decrease. Through the rise of on-demand streaming platforms, ad blockers, and blind watching, the ad itself is harder to bring to potential consumers. Branded content tries to turn the idea of classic commercials around. It transforms from something you had to watch into something you want to watch. It also comes in a new variety of mediums. Podcasts, video games, or in forms of getting involved with the consumer directly. Branded content tries to put the brand’s history in the foreground and communicate its values in a way that is appealing to the customer even beyond the product. Through this approach of creating content, brands can stay relevant, independently from the product or service they are selling. Especially for reaching young adults, branded content is interesting. They are the ones who consume less established media, like classic tv or radio, so brands need to adapt their forms of communication. A new generation of consumers is interested in how brands deal with social, racial, and environmental issues. Furthermore, the covid crises chanced the way we consume in a radical way and brands need to react on that to stay relevant. 

Link: www.shots.net/news/view/why-branded-content-is-the-future

by Tina Schart -

Treatment approaches in acquired Prosopagnosia (AP) – Part 2

There are several types of therapies or programs that are intended to achieve improvements. These types of therapies are used to learn how to work around all the deficits and focus on parts of the face. These are programs that I found during my research, but there are a lot more. So the selection is as follows:

  1. Comparison of photos of unknown and known faces
  2. Learning face-name associations
  3. Identifying which face of a selection of faces best matches the target face
  4. Distinguishing images of real or computer-generated people. 
  5. Electrical stimulations
  6. Semantic association chain with additional information about the shown faces
  7. Faces of targets as caricatured versions for recognition
  8. Participants’ attention is drawn to prominent facial features
  9. Only the eye area is shown and participants are asked to say what thoughts and feelings are shown
  10. Two faces are shown and participants should determine age and gender
  11. Faces that look similar or the same should be matched into pairs

According to several studies and a wide variety of tests, the most helpful programs for AP are those that direct attention to prominent facial features, in other words encoding strategies. Age as well as gender, origin or handedness have no effect on whether improvement is possible or not.

To give a little more insight into one of the many types of therapies, here is one of the methods. A computer game has been developed in which the participant must determine the faces with the greatest similarity to the target face. This game has 10 levels, which become increasingly difficult and challenging depending on the successful completion of the previous levels. Each level consists of searching for a target face from a selection of several faces. The faces searched for were presented frontal or slightly from the side. The further the level, the fewer similarities the faces had with the target face. However, in order to see the first successes, a lot of time must be taken into account. The picture below shows three levels of the game.

Computer game with 10 different difficulty levels, in which the participant must determine the faces with the greatest similarity to the target face.
This table shows a list of participants with AP in therapy programs who either noticed improvements as a result or not.

(Next up in Part 3: Treatment approaches in developmental Prosopagnosia)

Sources

  1. Face Processing Improvements in Prosopagnosia: Successes and Failures over the last 50 years, Joe DeGutis, Christopher Chiu, Mallory E Grosso, Sarah Cohan (8.2014), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264940858_Face_Processing_Improvements_in_Prosopagnosia_Successes_and_Failures_over_the_last_50_years
  2. Rehabilitation of face-processing skills in an adolescent with prosopagnosia: Evaluation of an online perceptual training programme, Sarah Bate, Rachel Bennetts, Joseph A. Mole, James A. Ainge, Nicola J. Gregory, Anna K. Bobak, Armanda Bussunt (04.11.2019), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343935303_Prosopagnosia
by Viktoria Rest -

A new generation of consumers

While emotional branding and the “tribe” that comes with it worked for previous generations, the GenZ seems to be different. Generation Z is born between 1997-2015 and is the first fully grown digital generation. Therefore their personal expression differs from previous generations. The digital self comes to the fore. Regarding consumption habits, GenZ tends to be more aware of environmental and social issues. Second-hand shopping and renting mobility devices are more common than the desire of calling certain products their own. Studies show that a majority of this generation thinks that companies have a social and environmental responsibility, so they are more likely to choose brands that are aware of these issues and set actions. GenZ also searches for individuality, when it comes to consumption. Their own individual identity is at the center of their decisions. So they reach for brands that underline that individual expression. 

In the future, it will be much more important that brands get active and become aware of their actions and responsibilities, and do their part. Through the possibility of access to information it will get easier for consumers to recognized inauthenticity in a brand’s behavior and actions, so to stay or become relevant brands need to deal with these topics. 

Link: www.shots.net/news/view/for-gen-z-consumption-is-about-self-expression

Picture: www.commbox.io/the-customer-service-experience-for-millennials-and-gen-z/

by Viktoria Rest -

What is emotional branding?

Brands use emotional branding to create a connection between the brand and the consumer by using emotions in a specific way. Advertisers try to generate content that can be triggered by a consumer’s personality, needs, goals, or experiences. It also describes a supportive tool in marketing that is used to strengthen a brand’s perception. It helps to support the brand’s identity and public image. In a world, with global competitors, it’s important for brands to deliver an individual language and gain the trust of the consumer. Emotional branding gives the brand a character and makes it possible to pull clear from competitors. The goal is to create full brand loyalty towards the consumer. 

BBC-story-works did research on the topic of emotional branding. In “The science of memory” the researchers describe how brands can create big moments in advertising that can manifest themselves in the consumer’s long-term memory. The study proves that if very personal stories or experiences of a protagonist in advertisements are promoted, the consumer connects these emotions to the brand. Especially if the issues portrayed are somehow relevant for the individual consumer. 

Emotional branding is an important tool not only for the brand’s image itself but also for a new generation of consumers, that tend to be more interested in a brand’s social and environmental attitude than generations before. 

Links:

www.bbcglobalnews.com/media/3174/bbc-science-of-memory-2018.pdf 

www.marconomy.de/emotional-branding-warum-marken-geschichten-erzaehlen-a-832350/ 

by Sabine Probst -

The health of the oceans ecosystem

Human activities are damaging the health of oceans in profound ways. Global warming, overfishing and pollution are threatening aquatic ecosystems, and a number of species face extinction.

PLASTIC POLLUTION

In simple terms, plastic pollution refers to plastic waste being found where it shouldn’t. In the context of oceans, this is anywhere. Still, according to estimates, an additional 8 million items of plastic enter the ocean each day. In total, almost 300,000 tonnes of plastic can be found in the oceans, and the weight of plastic is predicted to exceed the weight of all populations of ocean-dwelling fish by 2050.

The majority of the plastic comes from littering – from the fishing industry, waste left on beaches, rivers and in drains, among other things. Poorly managed landfill waste sites and industry discharges also contribute significantly. Despite the indisputable impact on marine life, the oil industry (one of the biggest sources of plastic pollution) is increasing its plastic production. Currently, the demand for plastics requires 12 million barrels of oil per day for manufacturing. By 2050, this figure is predicted to increase to 50 million barrels of oil per day due to rising demands.

The durability of plastic makes the environmental issue more pressing. Indeed, the US Environmental Protection Agency has stated that all plastic ever created likely still exists. The impact of this can especially be seen at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest collection of plastic waste in the world with an area of almost 700,000 square miles and growing every day.

This has a huge toll on aquatic species. In the North Pacific alone, it is estimated that fish are ingesting up to 24,000 tonnes of plastic every year. This affects the wider food web and, ultimately, humans. A 2015 study for the Scientific Reports journal found that around a quarter of all fish in Californian and Indonesian fish markets contained plastic microfibres.

Fish are not the only species at risk from plastic pollution. It is estimated that as much as 99 per cent of all seabird species will have ingested some form of plastic by the year 2050. Additionally, sea turtles and monk seals are at risk of mistaking plastic debris for food. Indeed, an increasing number of ocean animals are found dead or entangled as a result of plastic waste, with estimates suggesting that around 100,000 marine mammals are killed each year.

A further concern for plastic pollution is that clean-up operations can be very hard to execute effectively. Plastic accounts for between 60 to 90 percent of all marine debris, but only 1 per cent of all marine debris floats. This makes extracting it a costly and difficult task.

CORAL REEF DEGRADATION

https://images.app.goo.gl/HPCvDpZ6FQAq2PaE8

The destruction of coral reefs has been increasing at alarming rates in the last decade, with a third of all corals in danger of extinction. Coral reefs are important for maintaining diverse marine environments, as they provide nourishment and shelter for many aquatic species. Conserving coral reefs is also important for human populations around the world, with many areas dependent on the livelihood provided by corals (such as fisheries and tourism).

A number of anthropogenic influences are responsible for the ongoing coral reef crisis. The main culprit is climate change. Warming ocean temperatures are responsible for nearly 50 per cent of coral destruction and reef bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. Reef bleaching refers to the loss of vibrant colour from coral organisms as a result of changing water conditions. It is possible for corals to recover from bleaching, but a bleached coral reef is more susceptible to disease and may indicate impending death.

Dynamite fishing is also responsible for the degradation of coral reef ecosystems. The use of cyanide to stun and capture fish has a devastating impact on coral polyps as they are unable to metabolize the poison. This practice of fishing is commonly practiced in Indonesia and the Philippines, two countries considered hotbeds of coral reef populations.

Other anthropogenic factors that damage coral reefs are irresponsible tourism and sedimentation. An increase in coral reef tourism has seen a tantamount rise in reef mismanagement, where tourists often damage reefs by stepping on them or inadvertently touching them. Tourism boats vessels used for exploration trips or recreational activities are also damaging reefs through the misplacement of anchors and reckless route planning. Sedimentation refers to the transfer of harmful particles from land surfaces to the ocean. It is caused by increased urbanisation, land use change and coastal mining. The increase in ocean sediment has led to diminished sunlight and nourishment for coral reefs.

information, conservation diploma course COE

by Johannes Koelbl -

Analog/Digital Input – Bela Board into Pure Data

Analog Input

Analog signals can vary anywhere between 0 and 1, whereas digital signals on the Bela have only two states (0, 1). In my project I am using two different types of analog sensors, which are an accelerometer and two potentiometers. I will explain them in more detail afterwards. With these analog inputs you can have a variable control over some parameters and tune them exactly like you want them to be. (Bela, 2021)

To read from the analog inputs in Pure Data an adc~ object is needed. The incoming signals are sampled at audio sampling rate, so that you can handle them in the same way as audio signals.

Analog Input in PD; Source: bela.io

Digital Input

As mentioned above, the digital inputs have only two states and are perfect suitable for push buttons. The digital port has to be configured as an input or output. To use a push button it has to be an input of course. If the button is pressed, the input receives the incoming 3.3 volts, and 0 V when its off. In the following example in Pure Data, digital pin 18 is set as an input and pin 17 as an output. (Bela, 2021)

Digital Input in PD; Source: bela.io