Real Time Social Spaces

During the fall I helped produce a symposium/exhibition for Residency Unlimited's Food Futures Residency program. There were multiple components to that project, including an interactive exhibition created on three.js that I built from scratch. Using the boilerplate that Aidan introduced to us in class, I wanted to recreate the exhibition in the new and improved realtime environment to allow for a more engaging user experience.


LINK: https://food-futures-rtss.glitch.me/

I wanted to start building a structure for the narrative I wanted to convey. I took inspiration from the floor plan of the Georgia O'Keefe museum and recreated/modeled it in Vectorworks, added some material it in Vectary, and rendered it in my real time environment.

I continued to develop the space this week and explored how particles can be used to visually represent air quality. Similar to the buildings and bar charts, this visualization allows the user to manipulate the slider in the GUI to affect that amount of particles in the environment, which ultimately represent an increase in pollution over time.

There are a lot of ways to make particles in three.js. I ultimately opted to render many spheres using a for loop:

for (let i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
 var mesh = new THREE.Mesh( geometry, material );
 mesh.position.x = ( Math.random() - .45) * 30;
 mesh.position.y =  Math.random()  * 10;
 mesh.position.z = ( Math.random() - .45) * 30;

I also had the opportunity to do some user testing this week with my thesis class and got some valuable feedback. Some notes from the feedback session:

Our urban environments are rapidly and dynamically changing by day, month, year and decade. Urbanists, data scientists and artists are constantly thinking about new ways to share information about these changes. For this assignment, and probably for the semester, I want to try to capture the essence of our perpetually changing cities through this real time online environment.

For this week I focused on changes in median home price in major cities over the past decade. I created three GUIs that represented those changes in the major cities with the three biggest changes: Phoenix, Detroit, and Oakland. In the future, I'd like to display more information like changes in air quality and pollution, visualized through particles.

Sources:
- https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-the-largest-increase-in-home-prices-since-2010

In the 17th and 18th century, English coffeehouses became a commonplace for political rhetoric and discourse. Historians often associate English coffeehouses, during the 17th and 18th centuries, with the intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment: they were an alternate sphere, supplementary to the university. Political groups frequently used coffeehouses as meeting places.

In the 20th century, the teashop played an integral part of the women's liberation movement. In the late 19th century women attended meetings about suffrage alongside men at town halls, but smaller gatherings outside the home were impossible as "respectable women" couldn't visit the bars of chop houses frequented by men. The tearoom provided a sheltering space for suffragettes, and became an integral part of the women’s liberation movement.

Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17th_and_18th_centuries
- https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/womens-history/suffrage/taking-tea-and-talking-politics/

In an effort to re-create this ethos of political discourse, I've tried to a real-time connected experience for two people using p5LiveMedia and p5.js that shows users a political prompt to discuss. The prompts chosen are considered by various pollsters to be relatively bipartisan issues. Given the political polarization that currently exists in this country, this idea is meant to promote genuine and substantive political discourse in a time where that exists. The application also includes a text input that allows users to incorporate text on the canvas, to re-create a mood board like environment.