Essay for Interactive Visualization

The structure of the game for Interactive Visualization

Our course Interactive Visualization is about creating interactive visualizations for real processes. In our case this process is the creation of a chip and our part especially is the oxidation process, which is a sub-process of the chip creation. This process is going to be visualized using the Game Engine unity, the 3D modeling program Blender, the image editing program Adobe Photoshop and the Development Environment Processing. The planning of the Visualization is to create a 2D slider game in which you can move a character through a 2.5 dimensional environment. The environment is a street with some lanterns and signs, showing the directions in which you can go and what you will find there. At the start of the game the user will see an overall explanation video of the whole oxidation process. After that video you can move your character to the next video which explains specific parts in detail. To each of these detailed videos follows a moving platform which you can use to go on a higher platform. On these higher platforms you will find an applet which gives you the possibility to test your knowledge about the process step yourself. If you choose not to use the moving platform you will just go to the next explanation video. This goes on until you reach the end of the whole platform. Since the oxidation process in only one sub-process, there exist more sub-processes. Each sub process can be entered on a different planet representing the planets of the Little Prince story. Therefore reaching the end of our platform teleports you on one of those planets. By travelling through the planets you can explore all the sub-processes to get more insight in the creation of a chip. Each planet is created differently as well as each level has a different form of interactive visualization.

The progress of creating the game

For this project we started to inform ourselves about the whole process in which chips are produced. After we got the basic knowledge we arranged a meeting with Tom, the professor who overviews our project to explain to us the Oxidation sub process in detail. Then we decided to make our game as explained above. We divided the tasks so that one of my teammates would make a general introduction video to explain the process and the detailed explanation videos. The two other mates decided to make the applications in which you can test your knowledge about the process. I decided to make the compilation in unity and model the needed objects. Since we wanted to get a little more insight in how this process practically works and to get off of the theoretical knowledge only we made another appointment at which we could visit the clean rooms in the nano-lab to view the creation of chips. We took some photos and videos as material for the project and started to work. We thought it might be too less time to make all the applications within unity so all these apps are going to be in processing instead.

Our game for Have Fun And Play

Another of our courses is called ‘Have Fun And Play’ and it is about creating a game preferably using unity. We decided to build a big group to have everyone do specific tasks so we can get a more or less working game within our very short time limit. Our group had students for making a website, an introduction video, 3D models, the unity compilations, scripts, photos, concept art, the story, background pictures and sounds and so on. Our idea was to make a game which scenery represents the city of Enschede and especially its big church in a post-apocalyptic form. Therefore one group of students went out to make photos of the city so the 3D models could be made. We decided to make the game a mix out of action and adventure genre. The story group came up with an idea that fits into the concept.

The final version of this started with an average guy who wakes up near the destroyed city in the center of Enschede. He has no idea what happened to him or the city, but he finds clues around the church. This is where the game starts and the goal of the game is to find out what really happened. So searching for clues and running from things and persons that try to kill you is the main content of the game. You would eventually be called by a supercomputer from under the church which leads you to it. A big part of the game is getting there and then you would find out that the computer is actually the last and only true Google computer trying to destroy the world while you fought for it and against some of the last survivals that tried to destroy the computer. But when you find out you have been mislead there are also some other survivors the computer mislead and who don’t find out the truth so they are still fighting for it.

While the story group worked on what I just mentioned some of us already started modeling. We finished the monument in front of the church, the church itself, a post-apocalyptic and partly textured church, tables, chairs, lanterns, a post-apocalyptic lantern, a post-apocalyptic and partly textured table as well as a textured character. By the end of the last week we had put everything together in a working unity project in which you could work around with your main character. Still there were no real interactions at that time.

Another group made the website for our project. It is inspired by the Gears of war homepage http://gearsofwar.xbox.com/en/AgeGate?source=%252f and looks like this http://mlamore.leadhoster.com/cgs/ . On that website you can find news about our game, the minutes of our meetings, some concept art and when ready the final game.

Another group of students prepared an introduction video to present our concept and game. The introduction video can be found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k8CRzK3LUM .

Essay for Have Fun And Play

Nuclear power phase-out

The nuclear power phase-out is a very big theme for a long time, but especially since the last accidents in Japan. In my essay I am going to concentrate mostly on the German reactions to this event and the pros and cons of clear energies.

What happened in Japan

On Friday, March 11^th the biggest ever measured earthquakes with a magnitude of 9.0 occurred in Japan. These earthquakes lead to a 10m high tsunami wave which hit the northeast coast of the country. Together those two events destroyed the landscape and took many lives and homes. Also 11 of the 54 total atomic power plants in Japan had to be shut down. The one in Onagawa had a fire in the turbine building. In another power plant, Fukushima 1, the cooling system of one of the six reactors fell out. These circumstances made the government call out the atomic state of emergency.

On Saturday, March 12^th a serious explosion in reactor one in Fukushima 1 destroys the roof and walls of the reactor building. It is obvious that radiation escapes out of the power plant although the Japanese government understates the seriousness of these, how they call it, accidents. It is possible that a core meltdown takes place, which could lead to a disaster beyond all expectations.

In the following days the crisis heats up. I am not going into detail anymore because the facts can be read all over the World Wide Web and the situation should be clear.

Reactions in Germany

Of course there was a huge condolence with all victims and their families in Japan. Also there were many aid and donation programs for the Japanese population but this is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the political exploitation and the societal scare mongering. It is often said that the Germans exaggerate every bad thing and have a very pessimistic view in general. As far as I have experienced it at least the first thing seems to be true. Anyhow soon after the incidents in Japan the German population feared nuclear power plants more than ever and the politicians used this fear to get more followers for their party by telling them to phase-out of the nuclear power dependence. Promises were made to test every atomic power plant in Germany to ensure the safety of those plants. But what were those promises for? Not to take the fear of the population but to get them as voters. Sure it wasn’t told that every power plant gets checked regularly and if it was then only in a short clause. How can it even be that such a catastrophe is needed to let our power plants be checked? I don’t think so, but the politicians had only the next election days in their mind.

For these election days there were a lot more promises made and a lot of crap was told. For one thing was that Germany could get out of the dependency of nuclear power plants within very little time. But fact is that more than 20% of the energy production in Germany is produced by nuclear power plants. What the politicians tell us is that they want to phase-out as soon as possible, but what they don’t tell us is that this is impossible without immense costs which of course the population will pay. I think everyone wants to phase-out of the nuclear energy production and change to clean energy but this cannot be done without immense costs and nor should it be done. I think we should use the nuclear power plants for some decades. Why? Because the safety standards are very high in German plants and they have quite some advantages. On long term we shouldn’t use them at all but now they safe jobs as well as that the variable costs to run them is nearly zero in relation to what they produce.

Although many people grasped the speeches of the politicians as crap or at least exaggerations to get voters, there were a lot more that feared nuclear energy and wanted immediate results. Now the industry nation Germany is shutting down a lot of nuclear power plants and losing a lot of money.

Conclusion to the reactions

The phase-out of nuclear power is a necessary step. Although it is very unlikely that the set time zone of the government can be kept. And probably most important of all we will lose a lot of money and the population will have to pay for it although they probably didn’t get that yet.  

What renewable energy alternatives exist?

Renewable energies are energies which source replenishes very fast or where the usage of them doesn’t deplete the source. The most common sources of such energy are sunlight, wind, rain, tides and geothermal heat. I am going to name some advantages and disadvantages of some of these.

Sunlight:

The positive thing about solar energy is that it is environmental friendly and that there is an infinite amount available.

One negative point about solar energy is that the costs to produce solar cells and complete photovoltaic installations are very high. Furthermore solar cells consist of chemicals and ecologically damaging material. Therefore the disposal of the cells is not very environmental friendly. Last but not least solar energy is not very reliable, since it is dependent on weather and season of the year.

Wind

Beneath the positive points that hold for each renewable energy, wind energy has some more advantages as for example that the use of space is very little. Furthermore it is quite cheap to build wind power plants.

But still there are a lot disadvantages as well. As well as the solar energy there are some dependencies that make the wind energy very unreliable. They need to be build in regions at the coast or on mountains to get the most energy but exactly on those places it is hard to settle industry. Wind is not savable so it needs to be transformed into energy right away. Wind power plants do not provide a lot of energy and are very noisy, so they need to be placed in quite a large distance to housing areas. Last and perhaps also least some of birds and bats die due to collision with the rotor blades.

Water

Water power plants have a very high efficiency and once build a power plant can endure up to 100 years. They can provide a flood control and improve the navigability of rivers.

By building big water power plants you make a huge intervention in the natural life, since you destroy natural habitats. The flowing waters are interrupted by the impoundment. At big reservoirs there is the possibility to lead to an earthquake. Often it is necessary to resettle whole villages to place a water power plant. There is also the danger that in rivers with only a little water flow there can occur a kind of flood wave if the power plant needs to deliver a huge amount of energy very fast. Also water power plants endanger the fish stock and makes nearby bottomland fruitless.

Conclusion

There exist already a lot of renewable energies, but none of them is perfect yet. Still they are way better than nuclear energy is, but we should keep in mind that they also have disadvantages.

My essay about Web Technology

Our second study course by Anton Eliens is Web Technology. In Web Technology - as you might guess – we should inform us more about how the web works and learn to make for example our own homepages using html. We were still working on our video project during this course but we finally finished it a day before presentation. The presentation went quite good although I was pretty sure we won’t make it in time because in our group were some members who didn’t really make their work in time so that those who had to work with the material of the others had less time than planned. Because of me being the one who made the XIMPEL stuff which is the last step in the project, I had to hurry up. But I am glad we really made it in time in the end. To come back to the course, we had some new assignments. One of these was to make a “worst page”. Sounds stupid but I think it was one of the best assignments so far, because on the one side, you need to deal with the technology needed to program such a site and on the other side it can be very funny to make an annoying webpage.

As I already knew how to deal with HTML and PHP I knew the structure of these languages as well. That made it quite easy for me to learn how to include JavaScript and CSS into these documents. For my worst page I looked for a way to reload the page continuously after a specified amount of time. This is quite easy solved by using an AJAX function (which is in a way only JavaScript). So I reloaded the page 3 times a second or something like that. Then I wanted to implement a function that changes the position of the window as well as the size every time the page is reloaded. Using some random functions and searching for the commands to change the position and size of the window using JavaScript I soon had what I wanted. After that I searched for some annoying music which I found in a Japanese song. I added some sound tracks to the song using Adobe Premiere and then implemented the music as background music for the webpage. Then I searched for some annoying gif’s I could use for my background. As I found them I implemented one of them as default background and made another random variable which gave the webpage another background each time the page reloads. Finally I implemented an annoying text with random color black or white and put a mouse over event on the text which would again call my functions to change position and size of the screen and additionally call an alert function to open randomly between 1 and 20 times. This is the link to my worst page: http://ewi1544.ewi.utwente.nl/c.berg/worstpage/newhtml.html

But you will need to open it with the Mozilla Firefox Browser and please make sure your speakers aren’t too loud and you have no tabs opened you won’t find back. Although if you know how to, you may close the window easy. Just make sure your cursor stays on the most top of the screen to not activate the mouse over function, then simply close the window by pressing CTRL (German: STRG) and W.

To conclude the Web Technology course I would like to give a brief review. At first I think it wasn’t very logical to give us due dates for reviewing the group work that are before the final event. The same happened in the first course where we had to review our fellow students before really getting them to know. Although we could have changed that afterwards, but then why make a due date before?

Furthermore I heard from some students that we did not really learn anything in these courses and that we had to learn everything on our own. I personally had not really a problem with that but that might be because I did most of the stuff here in my last school. So for some students who for example did not write any line of code before or did not even know what HTML is, well they had a big problem learning all these things within a very short time. But then again I think you learn more if you did it yourself than just by hearing from any professor how to do this and that. By trying yourself you understand better what you do and you can remember it better. This tells me that there should be made a compromise between these two extremes. Although I really must admit that our teacher provided a very good support either by e-mail or personally. All in all, this course was a big deal better than the last and I really liked it although it made me work a lot.

My essay about ‘We Create Identity’

In the beginning of the course I was really confused about what this all could be about. Especially Anton Eliens’ homepage improved this feeling of being confused. I was wondering what he is expecting from us and tried to figure it out of his lectures. After a while I realized two things. The first thing is that he wants us to be able to present ourselves and how to sell ourselves in a good way (hopefully an understandable translation of the German phrase “sich gut verkaufen koennen”). The other thing is that he wants us to experience the web, which worked really well at least in my opinion.

To underline that I am going to explain you what I already learned. The first thing was the blogger. I have never read a blog before (shame on me) and never searched for something like that. But in case of your assignment I created a blog on blogger which was really easy to do. Then I searched for things I can add to the blog (beneath these simple things like links or pictures….). I found out that it is very easy to add many gadgets to your blog. I used a list of interesting links, a video bar gadget as well as the blog archive and the fish gadget (the one window where fishes follow your mouse arrow and eat the food you can put by clicking).

Most other things I learned are because of the interactive video project (I will come later to this). At first I experienced the Google documents and Google presentations, which I never even heard of before. It was kind of fascinating for me that you can edit your work with multiple persons at the same time because I had the problem of not being able to even open a Microsoft Word document while another person is editing it.

Another important thing I got to know is the Google groups. There it is really easy to create an own page with several features. We did so for our group RiG (come to this later too). But because of the fact that this is repeating with the blog thing I am going to switch to the XIMPEL part. For that I need to explain our interactive video assignment first.

Well we had to form groups which members have the same interests in case of what the video should be about. My group is called RiG which stands for “Reality interacts Gaming”. Our themes are fitness and education, so that our interactive video will be about that. Our concept for the video is that we introduce a fat, lazy student who got just broken up with his girlfriend because of him playing too much computer games. Then there is an opportunity for the student to change his life, he sees an advertisement about a new game which makes the player do more sports and learn more for school or university. As player of this interactive video you can decide whether to play the game or not (of course this is only one of many choices). If you do everything right you can make your avatar an attractive, intelligent and sporty person. To realize the interactive part in the video we needed a program called XIMPEL.

I already have some programming experience so I am the one of our group who does the XIMPEL part. After realizing that XIMPEL is not a user friendly click and drag program as you often have nowadays I started to figure out which data of the XIMPEL-package stands for what. Then I started to read the code and tried out my own examples. In the end I really can say that the name (S/X)IMPEL fits. Furthermore I learned how to edit videos using the Adobe software. After editing I had to consider the problem of how to convert all the videos we made into the same format, size and so on. Luckily I already had a program for that before. The program is called SUPER and I think it really is. It is not only for free it can even handle more formats than I know. Therefore I made the first interactive video part we already showed in our course.

Now I would like to change to another theme than just the ‘We Create Identity’ course.

I would like to tell something about my expectations and hopes concerning the whole study program. Many things we did so far are the creative part of our study and almost only what we did on our own belongs to the technology part. Regarding this I hope our study program will become a little more technical. I am especially interested in C++ game programming as well as game programming in any other language. Therefore I would be very delighted if we implement these themes in our study program. What I would like to do is a simple game like for example the classic Mario. This is because I am very interested in how you design these “progressive environments”.

Presentation of our interactive video project

Last Friday we had to present our interactive video project. Therefore two of my fellow students organised a good location, drinks and something to eat for the visitors and of course for us. It was a quite successfull event with nearly no technical problems and a good amount of visitors at least for the first round (the event was divided in to two rounds). To show you the results of our work:
RiG interactive video
Also I already found the work of some fellow student groups online:
Bananas
Irresponsible use of media
Alien Invasion
Busje komt zo
Urban Mayhem

Hope you enjoy these

My study: Creative Technology

Since I am studying Creative Technology, I would like to tell you what I think about it so far.
Well at first I need to tell you that there are three courses by now. Those are "We Create Identity", "Graphic Design" and "Introduction To Computer Science".
In the first one or two weeks "We Create Identity" was really confusing for me. This was because I did not really have an idea about the courses goal. By now I like the course and I recognized that this course is mainly about two things. One is that you learn to present yourself, the other thing is to explore a huge amount of technology mainly online, like this blogging site, google documents, google groups and so on.
Graphic Design is a second course which confused me at first, because the course started by talking about numbers, letters and signs and that for hours. But then we went on with talking about pictures. Now I really have an idea how to use typefaces and where to place an object in a picture as well as the colour, size ... I use. This is really helpful and I like to sit in the classroom and talk about the work of my fellow students as well as it is very helpful hearing them talk about your work and making suggestions about what could be done better.
Our third course is Introduction to Computer Science which I liked from the beginning because it really is the most technical course which I am very interested in. We are talking about everything like the OSI model in a very practic way as I think.
Actually that is everything by now and I am looking forward to our programming courses hoping there will be as much game designing aspects as possible :)