Stage-directing the Virtual Reality Experience: Developing a Theoretical Framework for Immersive Literacy

Despite the incremental improvement and inclusion of immersive technologies in entertainment, training simulation, fine art, inclusive design, academia, and education; Virtual Reality (VR) still faces issues regarding its ability to compete with films and animation in visual storytelling without merging into the realm of video games. In 2015, Pixar’s Ed Catmull warned moviemakers that Virtual Reality is “not storytelling” and argued that the linear aspect of narratives poses an obstacle that cannot be overcome with VR. In contrast, Catmull argued that VR has immense application in games. However, VR creators have been pushing the boundaries and possibilities of delivering narratives in virtual spaces. In 2019, the VR experience “Gloomy Eyes” was presented at the Sundance festivals featuring a 30-minute story split between 3 episodes. The simulation is structured to provide its audience with some degrees of freedom while guiding them intuitively through the virtual space. In 2021, Blue Zoo also released a VR project titled “The Beast” featuring a cyclist powering up a snow-covered mountain. The short film was entirely created in Quill VR with the intention of being treated like a theatrical play rather than a film. While the creators of “The Beast” have explicitly mentioned the influence of theatre, “Gloomy Eyes” draws its visual language from similar theatrical roots. This paper argues that VR has been mistakenly compared to film and animation when it should be associated with theatre. The audience of both are not passive as they are during the screening of a film or animation. The space and the medium demands participation through their presence in the same space with the actors/characters. Theatre presents a promising candidate for extracting criteria that could be used to develop a visual language for VR. This research aims to formulate a framework for developing a VR visual language through comparison between character-driven narratives in VR such as “Gloomy Eyes” and “The Beast”. The comparative study establishes overlapping criteria and characteristics found in the structure, literacy, sound, and delivery format of narratives in a theatrical performance. These criteria are then outlined and discussed, drawing from affordance theory and discussions on aural and visual attention in theatre, to form a holistic view in approaching VR literacy.

Static Analysis at GitHub

The Semantic Code team at GitHub builds and operates a suite of technologies that power symbolic code navigation on github.com. We learned that scale is about adoption, user behavior, incremental improvement, and utility. Static analysis in particular is difficult to scale with respect to human behavior; we often think of complex analysis tools working to find potentially problematic patterns in code and then trying to convince the humans to fix them. Our approach took a different tack: use basic analysis techniques to quickly put information that augments our ability to understand programs in front of everyone reading code on GitHub with zero configuration required and almost immediate availability after code changes.

Polyurethane Impregnation for Improving the Mechanical and the Water Resistance of Polypropylene-Based Textiles

Commercial waterborne polyurethane (PU) dispersions, different in chemistry and selected on the basis of eco-friendly components, have been applied to a common polypropylene (PP)-based woven fabric. Impregnation has been chosen as a textile treatment for improving the features of basic technical textiles in light of potential applicability in luggage and bag production. The effect of drying method, performed under conditions achieved by varying the process temperature and pressure, on the features of the treated textiles, has been verified. The prepared specimens were characterized in terms of mechanical behavior (tensile, tear and abrasion resistance) and water resistance (surface wettability and hydrostatic pressure throughout the treated textiles). The experimental results suggest an incremental improvement of the tensile features for all the investigated specimens. For tear strength, no augmentation compared to that of the neat textile, could be verified as a consequence of polyurethane treatment. Remarkable improvements of abrasion resistance were displayed for all the impregnated PP textiles. Benefits in water resistance could be attributed to the presence of hydrophobic PU in the textile weaving of the PP samples. The ultimate improvement in water resistance was dependent on drying conditions.

THE INFLUENCE OF CREATIVE STYLE PREFERENCE ON CREATIVE BEHAVIOR OF INDONESIA’ CREATIVE INDUSTRY WORKERS

This study explored the role of creative style preference on employees’ involvement in creative behavior and the moderating effect of creative style preference on the relationship between organisational culture and employees’ creative behavior. The study sample included 128 creative industry workers from 6 small and medium enterprises in Indonesia. Data was collected at Jakarta in early 2018 and gathered by using a questionnaire consisted of 2 cultural behavior dimension to measure workers’ creative behavior, namely presenting creative, concrete and practical ideas and presenting creative suggestions. Questionnaire was using Likert scale and the result was analysed with Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) method. The analysis indicted that the two distinct dimensions of creative behavior (presenting creative and practical ideas and presenting creative suggestions) were determined workers’ creative behavior. These two dimensions reflected the level of incremental improvement and presenting radical ideas in their activities. It is concluded that Indonesia’ creative industry workers are creative people who contributed to the productivity of an organization. It is suggested that organisations should create an organizational culture that motivates workers to improve their creativity level.

Asynchronous Peer Teaching Using Student-Created Multimodal Materials

This paper reports on asynchronous peer teaching in which learners create multimodal explanations or tutorials for future cohorts. Japanese learners of English work individually or in teams to produce video and audio explanations. Multimodal explanations that meet the quality requirements are uploaded to the respective course websites housed on the university server. The aim is that student audio-visual developers learn during the creation process and student users learn from the multimodal resources developed. Each year a new cohort of students makes a new set of explanations. The mean quality of the multimodal explanations increases annually as the less useful or less popular video and audio files are replaced. This creates a continuous cycle of incremental improvement.

A method for differentiating human induced pluripotent stem cells toward functional cardiomyocytes in 96-well microplates

The capacity of pluripotent stem cells both for self-renewal and to differentiate into any cell type have made them a powerful tool for studying human disease. Protocols for efficient differentiation towards cardiomyocytes using defined, serum-free culture medium combined with small molecules have been developed, but thus far, limited to larger formats. We adapted protocols for differentiating human pluripotent stem cells to functional human cardiomyocytes in a 96-well microplate format. The resulting cardiomyocytes expressed cardiac specific markers at the transcriptional and protein levels and had the electrophysiological properties that confirmed the presence of functional cardiomyocytes. We suggest that this protocol provides an incremental improvement and one that reduces the impact of heterogeneity by increasing inter-experimental replicates. We believe that this technique will improve the applicability of these cells for use in developmental biology and mechanistic studies of disease.