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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

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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Jan 30, 2022

I made something useful (and fun!) in #threejs #webXR - something that lets you see a mirror of your actions - live or with a delay, or save it to a GLTF file to share, or use in a 3D tool. Check it out at zachernuk.neocities.org/2022/slow-mirr (in Quest/etc) and read on for some observations!

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Brandel Zachernuk Retweeted

Maxim

@maxim_xyz

Jan 22

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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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Jan 6

At first I was going to build a procedural model myself, but found a great (unrigged) version at models-resource.com/pc_computer/ap and it was too beautiful not to use. Even simple/silly ideas like this teach you a lot, and I love some of the technical strategies that came out of this!

Happy New Year! Over the Christmas break this year I implemented the turret-gun from Valve’s Desk Job in #webgl #threejs - including using the controller! Check it out at zachernuk.neocities.org/2023/desk-job/

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I love this!

has used my #threejs-based 3D book generator for promoting his upcoming illustrated history of keyboards at shifthappens.site. It's a really smart usage (and subject), and I look forward to backing the kickstarter + getting the book when it comes out!

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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Dec 30, 2022

I am looking forward to reading this! Thank you to

@darthjulian

and co

@nearfuturelab

, the book looks gorgeous.

A copy of the book “The manual of design fiction”, a postcard with the tagline “time to imagine harder”, and the shopping envelope with the near future laboratory stamp on it.

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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Dec 19, 2022

In reading up on the game it was news to me (but not at all surprising) that it was inspired by "The Difference Engine" by

@GreatDismal

and

@bruces

- They've both had a huge influence on my Human-Computer Interaction thinking, so it's funny to note that this originated there too!

I rebuilt the 3D UI from The Chaos Engine! I loved the ingame UI (and everything else done by Bitmap Bros) and recent thinking about the future of UI made me want to go back and revisit it. So good! You can look at in 3D yourself or download at sketchfab.com/3d-models/chao

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I love disarming `camelCase` programmer terms by adding spaces back in. It renders them so banal and approachable!

The current state of the API for #threejs. I like looking at it this way!

a layout of the API of three.js, grouped by function, set on a single page. The norally-camelCased class names are separated by spaces.

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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.

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.

I'm reading through the history of the web presented at thehistoryoftheweb.com/timeline/ - While I was online for almost all of it, I was seeing it as a child. It's fascinating to see it again as an adult and think about the forces at play that shaped where many of us live today!

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Brandel Zachernuk Retweeted

Daniel Esteban

@DaniGatunes

Apr 6, 2022

So... from now onwards, I decree: We can't say anymore: "It's amazing this runs on a browser" We need to start saying more: "Why is this app not web based?"

And here's the Coca-Cola logo going through that same generator. Fun!

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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Mar 26, 2022

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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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Mar 11, 2022

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.

We swap the difficult mathematical problem for a simpler one of stabilizing percepts by dynamically tuning our own gait. It's how many predators pursue prey, and how the Allies achieved air superiority in WWII, dubbing it the "Tizzy angle", described here

en.wikipedia.org

Dowding system - Wikipedia

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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Nobuhiro Mifune

@NobuMifune

Oct 12, 2021

"Embodied Heuristics" by Gerd Gigerenzer in Frontiers in Psychology frontiersin.org/article/10.338

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!

...being able to import them into Blender is an added bonus too ;)

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... and then to play them back for yourself on repeat, or to send to other people...

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It's also cool to be able to record these "performances" to reflect on or to share with others...

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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!

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.

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!

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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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Dec 17, 2021

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.

wrote recently about the mechanics and architecture of the nascent social digital spaces we’re finding ourselves in, and the need to establish a gradient of engagement, ramping up and down more fluidly:

interconnected.org

Designing multiplayer apps with patterns from architecture

Posted on Friday 21 Jan 2022. 1,359 words, 7 links. By Matt Webb.

Anyone interested in the future of computing should go through all the

@UwRealityLab

lectures. I loved this talk from David Smith of

@CroquetIO

on "The Augmented Conversation," and the reminder that HCI is ultimately always about Human-Human interaction!

youtube.com

Reality Lab Lectures: David Smith - The Augmented Conversation

The Reality Lab Lectures - Tuesday, May 19, 2020TALK TITLE: The Augmented ConversationSPEAKER: David Smith (Founder & CEO, Croquet Corporation)TALK ABSTRACT:...

I captured a performance of head+hands from Oculus Quest directly from #webXR! Video & thread coming soon!

sketchfab.com

Performance from Oculus Quest webXR - Download Free 3D model by...

I did it! This is a performance from an Oculus Quest, exported to a GLTF file. This is the beginning of something amazing! - Performance from Oculus Quest webXR - Download Free 3D model by zachernuk

Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Dec 17, 2021

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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Brandel Zachernuk

@zachernuk

Nov 28, 2021

Twitter compression is pretty brutal, YouTube link here:

youtube.com

Gutenberg book

Live demonstration at https://zachernuk.neocities.org/2021/gutenbergA procedural visualization of the book files available from Project Gutenberg (https://ww...

Following in a series of experiments with books, I made an *interactive* #threejs-based #webGL generator for e-texts from

@gutenberg_org

! Really excited for how well it has turned out so far. Try it out at zachernuk.neocities.org/2021/gutenberg

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Also for anyone interested in the book in question, it's a fantastic inquiry into the origins of social inequality by

@davidwengrow

and the late

@davidgraeber

. It pairs well with

@doctorow

's recent column on Luddism in the present moment:

onezero.medium.com

Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature

It’s not what technology does that matters, but who it does it for and who it does it to

Oh and really last thing - it’s also using the excellent html2canvas by

@Niklasvh

- thanks for the great library! html2canvas.hertzen.com

Oh! One last thing: It turns out you can link directly to Environment maps and models from polyhaven.com. Super useful for assembling a scene and getting it to look right!

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!

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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