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Brandel Zachernuk
@zachernuk
AR / VR Creative technologist by day, digitally-embodied cognition enthusiast by night! he/they
Cupertino, Californiazachernuk.comJoined December 2010

Brandel Zachernuk’s Tweets

The importance of writing in VR is underrated. We’ve been writing for 5,000 years, it’s not going away, Keyboards on smartphone were key to adoption, VR controllers being very bad at writing, is a huge problem.
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Not that following the state of the art is an invalid activity - I do it with a passion myself! It's just that remembering all the blind alleys and could-have-beens lets us imagine an adjacent possible that we can borrow from to build a more thoughtful future for the medium.
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It's so refreshing to reflect on the various functions the web has performed - the mixture of personal, technical, corporate and governmental needs. It points to a much wider picture of possibility than simply following the state of the art through all the turns to the present.
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I made an SVG-to-neon generator in #threejs recently and so when Musk's 'Cyber Rodeo' announcement went out I wanted to see what it did. It does this! I like how incomprehensible it is at off-angles.
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Why is this important? It provides a clue for how to make interface systems to manage complexity. We're great at balancing continuous parameters of control like hand or head speed, *exceptional* at tracking moving objects. Algebraic formula? Not so much. We learn but it's hard.
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Do you know how baseball players catch fly balls? It's not by solving quadratic equations to identify the landing point! They adjust their running speed until the ball remains at the same angle in the air, and then keep running till they reach it. Amazing!
A baseball player catches a ball by matching their speed to its descent, and run until it lands. By turning a complex mathematical problem into a simple perceptual one, they are able to use their own motion both as a feature of perception and a contributor to the desired solution - to catch the ball.
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I read this a few days ago and it's still blowing my mind. Gigerenzer's demolition of "Rational Choice Theory" is important not just for pysch and econ but for Human-Computer Interaction as well. I look forward to future interface systems that facilitate embodied heuristics!
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"Embodied Heuristics" by Gerd Gigerenzer in Frontiers in Psychology frontiersin.org/article/10.338
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Finally, one of my goals is to build out simple enough boilerplate codebases for other applications to build on, so please steal this code and do stuff with it! Everything I wrote here is in a single file so that should make it easy :) So please, take it - and make something fun!
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Slow mirror is an experience with a singular focus on these abilities, to help see what we can be in XR, and what dangers come with that. While most people in XR know that harassment is real, they probably don't understand how bad it really feels. Now you can try on yourself!
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That's an astonishing amount of nuance that we’re used to having in our everyday lives, and for someone not sold on the tradeoffs of using a computer, it's too much to lose. Thankfully, immersive computing is starting to let really make use of these capabilities.
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While we’ve done a lot with these inputs in the past, we can and should do better: Your head has 6 degrees of freedom to move and turn, And people say our hands have *27* degrees of freedom between all the different finger curls and joint movements!
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To understand why, have to talk about how limited computer input is today: keystrokes are just binary actions & a cursor is a single 2D point of input. These represent the entirety of our person inside the digital space. I built all that out recently here:
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I made a #webgl demo of the Screen Capture API in #threejs. I hope you like recursion! Try it out for yourself at codepen.io/zachernuk/full
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VR has a lot of hype right now for immersing you in exciting new worlds. While that’s cool, I am a lot more interested in the possibilities of focusing on our own representation inside these immersive spaces - tracking our head and hands, and anything else we can get.
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Anyone interested in the future of computing should go through all the lectures. I loved this talk from David Smith of on "The Augmented Conversation," and the reminder that HCI is ultimately always about Human-Human interaction!
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Then I take the pixel difference in X and Y and generate the 'normal' map - a representation of what direction each pixel must be pointing in. It's a slightly complicated conversion but once it's built you don't need to touch it again. Perfect!
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Finally, there's the 'Normal' channel - this is a little more involved, because you need to use box-shadow and text-shadow for smooth transitions. In this example I'm building a height, or 'bump' map, where a grayscale value represents the height of a pixel/
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