Teaching Glass

Teaching, as in I have a Visiting-Professor gig this summer at the Centre for Digital Media. Glass as in Google Glass; I’m advising a group trying to drive an interactive documentary (someone said “walkumentary”) with wearable tech. There are six grad students with expertise in programming, animation, photography, film, and audio, and they’ve got fourteen weeks to see what they can make. Should be fun.

The team · Wenguang, Jessie, Cindy, Dan, Rob, and Valerie. They’re not dummies. They have a blog already, Aperture; check out their not-rosy-at-all first impressions of walking around wearing Glass. The picture apparently illustrates the “Hand shading technique”.

The CDM · It’s a co-op thing involving the four most visible post-secondary institutions in the Vancouver area: UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, and BCIT. The CDM happened after a big industrial company vacated its property in Vancouver’s central lowlands and donated a big chunk of it to the four schools. It offers a Master of Digital Media program, which is what I’m mixed up with. The MDM program has heavy flavorings of game-design, animation, and multimedia; so far I’m impressed.

The customer · The teams work in co-operation with businesses, here in Vancouver and around the world. Our project’s customer is 8 Leaf Digital Productions, a local media shop one of whose principals is an MDM grad.

The project · The notion of “Interactive documentary” is not that new. There are lots of them out there; my take, though, is that they really haven’t moved the needle much in terms of how we think about documentaries, nor about interaction for that matter.

Maybe wearables will change that. When you say “Augmented Reality”, people think of visuals imposed on the world; but I’d argue that what our team is trying to build is maybe another take on what that term could mean.

This is the second of two team projects that are part of the MDM curriculum; so these people aren’t rookies. We’ll see. Six grads, fourteen weeks, Glass; should be fun.