Blog – 2021 Groundhog Year
Ordinarily and customarily, I’ll make a lesser-spotted appearance in my blog, for the three people who actually went to the trouble of subscribing to it. I will forewarn you that this entry isn’t a million miles from one of those long rambling letters that you occasionally get in a Christmas card telling you all about the year that your uncle Terry has been through. If you don’t care particularly, jog on.
(Deep breath) Here goes:
No need to rehash the news of current, enduring affairs. It’s all a bit grim isn’t it? This year, whilst generally ducking-out of most situations which had been risk-assessed by either myself or institutions I belong to; marriage, university, job, I’ve been living in my shed, which is generally thought of as HIAB-HQ.
I made the announcement at the end of last year that I was actually about to start a masters degree in VR/XR storytelling. This probably served as a form of bemusement to some people. Job listings for VR/XR Storytellers being somewhere near the bottom of the gainful employment job-listings. I do believe that the web is heading into 3D and that the lines between reality and digital life will continue to blur, so in that respect and with that conviction, I stick to my guns in terms of thinking that the degree was a good step in backing the ‘right horse’.
I began the year by reaching out to an artist that I have always admired and pitched the idea of some exploratory work in virtualising some of their ideas. I was somewhat amazed when they responded with a positive ‘ok, let’s try it out’.
(Un) fortunately, this also coincided with the degree starting. So the first quarter of 2021 was a flurry of doing uni lectures, preliminary VR work and experimenting on the side to honour the loose arrangement made with said artist. I know that I’m being obscure here, but with good reason.
University was a strange affair. Pandemic conditions meant that for almost half of the academic year, I didn’t actually meet my tutors or fellow alumni until around May. I had hoped that actually attending campus, getting hands-on with the tech in the faculty cupboard would be part of the process but Covid seemed to knock that dream on the head.
As things transpired, I had to straddle two worlds, I managed to hold down my job supervising on a construction site on a part-time basis, then carried out my uni work during the days around that. It was less than ideal, but it was a necessity to pay my way, pay my fees, and not overburden Mrs Hiab-X with my problems as much as possible.
Talking of construction jobs, I had to take an exam for supervisors in order to update my mandatory construction scheme card. The pass mark was 45 out of 50 health and safety questions. I failed the first two attempts by scoring 43 and 44. When I did finally manage to bag the required result, my card photo was taken and certificate issued. The bloody-bastards managed to totally screw up the photo by turning me Umpa-Lumpa orange
By the time March had rolled in, the first deadlines for uni work had arrived, it was mostly written work describing a hypothetical VR project. ‘Hypothetical’ as nobody in my cohort, including myself actually had the skills to deliver our visions, this was accepted and baked into the first brief.
I came up with an idea for an immersive dream diary and wrote about it semi-academically, having never written a paper before and realising that Manchester Phrase Bank was a resource for trying to make myself sound relatively coherent.
Manchester Phrase Bank examples:
When using a term referring to something in the positive such as ‘This VR project is likely to garner praise and attention’ consider using ‘I reckon this VR project is top-banana, cock’
When warning potential users of said VR project, that motion sickness may prove to be an impediment to a small number of participants, incorporate ‘This VR experience will be sweet, but some of yous might feel hanging after, mate’
If a person provides reflexive and critical feedback requiring you to reconsider your methodology for implementation, try using “Go home you shower” as an appropriate response.
If a member of your family forms a part of user testing, such as a sibling. Try replacing the term ‘brother/ sister’ with ‘Our kid’.
Needless to say, my first paper, although passable, didn’t acquire a particularly impressive grade.
At this point, the year had been so intense, I was already feeling ‘I need a holiday’, but this was just a dream.
Towards the end of March, adding to the Tetris-effect of life, a family crisis in Norfolk occurred. I won’t go into it, but the situation was awful as I was pretty much nailed down to life over in the west country, there wasn’t a lot I would have been able to do, had I been nearer to my home city, as it was a situation which required professional medical treatment, but It was totally galling to not be able to have the option to go over and show support through physical presence.
This unfortunate situation continued through to the end of April but thankfully began to resolve.
One nice thing which happened during this time, was that a kindly person gave me a long-sleeve T-shirt which happened to be almost identical to an old, beloved T-shirt that I almost wore to death.
To celebrate being reunited with this historic item of clobber, I had my photo taken to show a ‘same shit, different decade’ view of what thirty years has been like for me.
I can’t complain, I know its vanity but I’m glad that I still have a good head of hair, I no longer smoke and can still get away with wearing KLF T-Shirts. It also has ‘MU MU’ written across the arse in big bold letters, which is a complete bonus.
May proved to be a slightly better month. Lockdown restrictions were lifted, which allowed for a semi-return to normal. My wife and I went to see Adam Buxton reading from his autobiography. It was good to see him in person, he’s just as charming in the flesh as he is in his wonderful podcast. It was a thoroughly enjoyable ‘first day out’ this year, even though we looked like assassins at the back of the auditorium.
later in the month, with the second semester now in full swing, I was able to meet two of my team in person, as we were collaborators in the new project we’d been assigned.
It was at this point that the year went a bit more mental than the intense-mental that it already had already been.
Our project was to collaborate with a local arts and music-based collective to offer a VR-based platform for them. This was all well and good on paper, but it did require having some fundamental skills in making 3D models. I’d been using Dreams up until that point.
While it was excellent for quick visuals, prototypes and anything which could be seen using that software on a Playstation 4, it had little currency beyond that. I was left with needing to quickly gain fluency in other software, so after a brief flirtation with Maya, I jumped ship and started learning Blender, as it’s free and largely respected as being a rising star in the industry.
I won’t deny that the process was stressful, I had to dedicate a fair amount of time to learning via video tutorials in order to attain the modelling skills necessary to make a meaningful contribution to the team effort.
I did manage to achieve this though. Towards the closing third of the project, I began churning out models and assets which were used as part of the world-building which helped to get our team over the finishing line. All things considered, our combined efforts paid-off by the time we’d reached July.
Did I mention that I was holding down a job while all of this was going on? It felt like sheer madness at times.
It also felt like Summer was passing really quickly. A brief respite from having to think about university work meant that I was available to commit to construction site work for a few weeks. This would be a few final weeks, as I’d had to hand in my notice.
My life-long, best friend Jamieson, had tipped me off that the final semester would most likely be so intense that I wouldn’t want to have my attention divided between anything other than project work. He’d been through the same process twenty years earlier, so I had no reason to doubt his insights.
A welcome three day break to Devon happened during late August, we’d been invited to a wedding reception in Plymouth, so we made a mini-break out of the occasion, moving on to Dartmouth for a couple of days. This transpired to be the only time out I’d take this year. It was a lovely little excursion while it lasted.
I should add that the approaching of my fiftieth birthday was adding some flavour to my thinking. Someone I probably would have got to know in the real world, but only knew via social media, died unexpectedly during August. His name was Tom, he’d been a VR/XR degree student from the previous year. I’d met him in VR when I attended the fateful open day which got the academic ball, rolling.
It turned out that Tom had been diagnosed with cancer, he was only twenty-five.
Another old friend of mine lost her partner to cancer around the same time, he was in his forties.
It all amounted to some pangs of a distinct sense of my own mortality.
I’d been thinking about the gap left in life by the departure of my friend Dave during 2015. Time has anaesthetised the pain to a large degree, but there’s been a hole which has remained, I’m aware of it most days, it became a friendship defined by the sense of absence.
I mention this as I began thinking that my final project would be a VR tribute to Dave. I’d tossed around a few other ideas and had concluded that this was the direction that I wanted to go.
The only two things which gave me pause for thought was feedback from my tutor, Rob, who asked some difficult questions about how this tribute might be executed, who the prospective audience might be? I also realised that while I had an idea, it didn’t seem completely defined, I couldn’t see the full-form and edges of it, so at the eleventh hour, I made a quick choice to relegate the idea to ‘Do it in your own time, when degree pressure isn’t a factor in decision-making’ I believe that I made the correct choice.
Then September arrived and the final semester began.
My wife and daughter had gone on holiday to Tenerife without me. I’d been advised to NOT take a holiday by the course leaders, until the degree was over. Upon refection, I probably could have gone away for a few days without it being an impediment to studies. Hindsight being what it is…
My final project was something that’s been a long-time coming. I was amused and somewhat gob-smacked when my tutors agreed with my pitch to use VR to recreate a psilocybin mushroom trip that had left its mark on my psyche during autumn 1994.
Look, I’ve rambled on considerably to anyone willing to listen, about this episode for many years, so I won’t inflict this on you now. Let’s just say that the event was epic AF, and that if you want to know more about it, point your browser to the link at the bottom of this entry.
If the middle semester had been about the rapid acquisition of just about enough skills to generate 3D models, then the final semester was largely about how to transfer those skills over into software called Unity, in order to make the models/art have functionality and meaning.
Unity is an industry-standard piece of software, known as a Game Engine. Once you know how to use it, you can make beautiful, AAA games, which normally take years to develop, often involving teams of creatives and coding geeks.
I had from September to December to attain just enough proficiency using the software in order to hand over my degree project. My starting point was ‘I haven’t really got any meaningful experience using Unity’
This was my skill level in September. I’d opened it a few times in the months before, but it was horrifyingly baffling. During the second semester project, I left working with Unity to my other team mate, Lilly, who had some previous experience with it. Learning Blender had been my role, and that had been fine for that part of the year.
God this is interesting isn’t it?
Moving swiftly-on. From September to December, my life was consumed by the work of learning and making. I had no days off. I often worked until midnight. My ability to do an all-nighter, died sometime during my early forties, so I drew from experience that it just isn’t viable to be functional the following day, if going to bed after one or two a.m is a thing.
During this intensive period, my focus was mainly on making The Psychehedron a workable VR retelling of my 1994 experience. When I wasn’t doing that, I had a twenty percent reciprocal creative investment in my friend and colleague, Tom’s project. This seemed far more straight-forward. I made him a couple of props: a train carriage and a TV set, and also loaned my body for a scan to be used in one of his scenes. The role: ‘Middle-aged dad’ Thanks Tom!
Tom was to contribute his twenty percent to my project by providing a model of the rural scenery where all the mushroom shenanigans took place. We soon realised that building a model of the area required more than looking at Google Earth images, so I took him out on a day trip to the place where it happened. It was almost a day-off, even though it was work related. After we’d been to the scene of the crime, a place now listed as ‘Ground Zero’, I took him over to Priddy, to look at the radio mast.
Towards the project deadline, I’d achieved a huge amount in terms of travelling from zero to almost hero. I just about knew my way around most of the software I was using, just enough to appear competent , that is.
It was now November, I was approaching my fiftieth Birthday, I was thinking ‘FUUUUUUCK!’ in the days leading up to it. On the one hand, I don’t feel remotely half a century old. I still drive around listening to Pop Will Eat Itself, I periodically zip around on my Segway scooter, my tastes in things haven’t changed a great deal in adult life, yet, I’m not who I was when I was younger, that really does feel like a life time ago and it technically was a life time ago. It’s hard not to think about how long I have left and how I intend to spend whatever remains.
To celebrate my Birthday, I continued working on the project throughout the day, taking a brief pause to get a booster jab, then returned to continue working as soon as that business was done with.
The thrills! I did get a morning laugh when my mother rang me to sing me happy Birthday, then concluded by muttering “I can’t believe I’ve sung that to you, fifty-fucking times”
Deadline day was a colossal disaster. I was supposed to upload the completed project to the university servers by 13:00. I was working on the final details until 12:30, and yes, I had worked the previous night until 02:00 then got up at 06:00 to make the most of any available minutes remaining.
It was all going well, but it had been my first opportunity to hit the ‘Build’ button in Unity which turns all the work into a theoretical ‘working app’ which could be deployed to any other PC. I was feeling fraught, yet confident as it all seemed to be performant. Except…when the damn thing had been built, the start button which worked perfectly fine in preview mode, didn’t work at all in built mode. This would have resulted in uploading a broken project. There wasn’t an easy thirty minute fix for this, so I missed the deadline.
Needless to say, I was a total wreck for about an hour afterwards. Thank goodness my family were so supportive and sympathetic. I’d also like to add that ‘Thank goodness part of the work procedure throughout the year meant writing reflexive journals and sending them to my course leaders’ because I think this managed to help provide an opportunity to resubmit the work at a later date, minus penalties.
It wasn’t like I’d slacked-off or hadn’t made the effort. I managed to resolve the issue within twenty four hours of finding the problem, but this involved a bit of redesign on my part.
Phew!
No rest for the wicked. As soon as this problem was resolved, there were others to address, a second deadline called ‘The professional practice portfolio’ which equated to various self promotional materials assembled into a PDF, plus a portfolio web site (I made two) plus updating various social media pages such as Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter etc. I had been allocating some time before hand to address these matters, so even though it kept me busy, I was able to get these things in the bag , in the nick of time.
Presentation day for the project was a mixed affair emotionally. On the one hand, a terrific sense of achievement, on the other, the final day as a university student, the final day with my fellow alumni and tutors, I was tired, news was full of the rapid spread of Omicron, the open day to visitors was fully booked.
The first person to try my psychedelic VR adventure was an elderly lady, who upon reflection might have only been looking for the loo or the Arnolfini Cafe. Her elderly friend had already ducked-out by saying
‘If it looks anything like that picture (pointing to my original Psychehedron drawing) It’ll give me a bleedin’ migraine’
Her friend was less cautious, and decided to don the headset. I could see what she was seeing via an adjacent monitor, when the virtual mushrooms kicked in, her facial expression changed and began to remind me of that scene in the Aphex Twin video for Come to Daddy, where the monster crawls out of the TV set and starts wailing in the face of the granny.
She didn’t say much afterwards, apart from ‘thanks’, then staggered off.
Over the rest of the day, various people tried my project out. I was delighted to hear laughter on cue at some of the moments I built into it. I’d narrated the storytelling and at times, left the occasional sardonic quip, just because that’s how I am. It was lovely to know that this wasn’t lost to some of my test audience.
I have to admit, when it was all over and done with, I slept like a baby for the first night of not having to think about project work. In the days which have followed, I’ve been relieved that my health appears to have been stable and no signs of the dreaded virus.
I’ll conclude this entry soon. Thanks for persevering if you’ve stuck with it so far.
I needed a creative palate cleanse shortly after the uni chapter had closed.
I instinctively decided to create a new VR space, a blank slate, a white terrain with a black sky…which began to uncurl itself into memories of diary illustrations from 1998. I was reminded that my intended magnum opus is to combine my writing, my illustration, my audio and bits of music all into one explorable VR space. If I can achieve that in this life and leave it as a form of artistic legacy, then I would feel that my creative work is done, It’s how I’d like to leave something as a remainder of me. I keep my journals, sites, records of most of what goes on inside my head and I think that VR still seems the best way to unify all of this and make all the disparate pieces fit together.
1998 wasn’t a particularly special year, but my drawings were about as minimalistic as I’ve managed so far, this makes a good starting point for a canvas of things which only exist in mind, with doorways leading to other eras, other states of inner experience and so on.
While I meditated on this and experimented a bit with the above imagery, I also made a little music which will ultimately represent the beginnings of the soundtrack for these liminal spaces.
While I was noodling away at this, I decided to let the artist (that I’d cryptically mentioned at the beginning of this missive) know that I was at last free to resume from where we’d left things earlier in the year.
I was able to rapidly produce a quick Unity example as a demonstration of what I could turn out quickly. They responded politely but completely disinterested, saying that things had moved on and that they didn’t feel that things relating to ‘The Metaverse’ was anything they’d been interested in.
It was hard to tell if they were pissed off with me that I’d had to drop the ball earlier in the year due to uni work (I had kept them in the loop) or…it seemed telling to include the term Metaverse, which was a word which suddenly popped up into the web via Facebook, who made sweeping declarations about how they were going to make it happen, even to a point of rebranding as ‘Meta’.
I guess I won’t know for sure, perhaps it was both reasons, but it served as a reminder that Facebook/Meta have managed to poison so much of technological modernity, that associations with it and its brand can leave a distinctly bitter taste in people’s mouths. This isn’t good for a flourishing sector like VR, I really do hope that the process evolves organically without disreputable organisations shoehorning their vision into what it should or shouldn’t be.
I’ll wrap-up with some overdue thanks.
I am in deep gratitude to my wife for her extensive support, love and patience with me this year while I’ve been a fleeting apparition between job and university work.
My family and friends for being completely on-board with this new direction for me, it has been a difficult time for everyone, and I appreciate the encouragement I’ve received during the journey.
I’d like to also make an additional thank you to my friend and web-host, Jason. We’ve never actually met in person or heard each other’s voices, but whenever I’ve needed some tech support, hosting and advice, he’s always been there.
My tutors and fellow alumni, even though it’s unlikely that they’ll read this, in a topsy-turvy year such as 2021 was, they were a good-natured and inspiring bunch of people to work with. It has been a pleasure and I feel like I’ve come away from the experience with some new friends.
You all completely rock and make life so much more bearable.
THANK YOU! XXX