-: So I'm, I'm Ben Kreimer here with colleagues
from the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.
Ash Smith, Jesse Fleming, and
Anna Henson I believe is here on the list to.
I'm technologist in residence.
I'll let my colleagues introduce themselves.
-: Hi, I am a assistant professor of Emerging Media Arts
at the Johnny Carson school of Emerging Media Arts,
Ash Eliza Smith.
-: Hi, I'm Jesse Fleming
also assistant professor of Emerging Media Arts.
Don't see, Anna.
-: Should we go to the presentation?
Ash?
-: Sounds great.
-: So we're going to
talk about the work that we've been doing
inside of Mozilla hubs
and we're going to show some examples
and Jesse is going to kick us off here.
-: Okay. So hopefully all of our technology
that we've set up for you
is working as we present technology.
Yeah. So
Let's see.
Okay, good.
So this is The Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts.
It opened in 2019.
Some of you are aware of it.
It's a, it's a lively place.
It's a place where we make work.
We exhibit work, we critique work.
It's pretty intimate.
This is a class I was teaching.
It was snowing out.
So we did a, like a fireside lounge
and we were just really getting started
and building out and developing our culture.
When you know what happened to us happen to everyone
this kind of poof moment
scatter.
And
we had to think of a new opportunity.
We had to evacuate the space.
We wanted to use this time as an example of
one of our teaching mantras,
our work mantras that
limitations or constraints are, are our opportunities.
This is a artwork by an artist named James Darell, which is
this is a little cutout in a, in a ceiling
and thought it was a good sort of analog for that approach.
The, the notion
is that whatever's in front of you, you can pivot and change
and use as sort of guideposts to your creative response.
So we,
we knew
that we still needed a space to meet collectively.
We needed a place to create work
and we needed to a place to review and critique work.
And eventually we wanted to continue with this
this new founded
tradition that we built
of open studios and opening that up to the public.
So we spent a lot of time.
I was working with Ben and Ash
at that point,
you know, meeting at nights
figuring out what's the technology we could use.
How can we move forward?
And we identified this thing called Mozilla hubs
and Mozilla hubs.
Ben will tell you more about it.
And I think
that the slides I have attached
are
maybe
not playing.
Can you play those on your end Ash?
Right.
So I'm sorry.
I tried to fix the permissions.
They're not playing, but it's okay
because
that's going to get sorted out
later on
during Ben's presentations, but essentially it, it
it was this place that
we could meet spatially
and we could repurpose the center and use
a lot of the affordances of the emerging art media art space
which is immersive and sometimes virtual.
So, Ben I'll hand it over to you to take over.
-: Okay. So what is Mozilla hubs?
Well, it's, it's a Mozilla product it's free
and open source,
and there's a
a cloud-based version that is highly customizable.
Then there's the free version that anybody can access.
Anybody can build with, which is what we used.
And you can get that at hubs.mozilla.com.
And it's essentially a 3d virtual world
for synchronous social gatherings.
And you can also create asynchronous experiences as well.
And it's a multimedia platform.
It lets you bring in 3d assets
3d files, 3d models, audio files, images, video
and they could be live or prerecorded videos.
And it's hubs is accessible in web browsers
and you can access hubs using virtual reality goggles,
mobile devices, computers, and again, it's browser based.
And so it's, it's very user-friendly
and anybody who's using
any one of those devices can,
everybody can interact together.
So you can be on VR goggles
and somebody else can be on a mobile device
and you will appear as avatars in the hubs environment.
And
here is
video.
Can you play that Ash?
I don't know why it's not playing.
Well, that's odd
Okay. Can you, Ash, just hit play
and then can you bump us up to YouTube real quick?
So real quick, just to show what hubs looks like
when you load it in the browser
you're able to turn on your microphone
test your, test your, your speakers, headphones and
using this we had students create Storyworld,
they created their semester work
and brought it into these hubs rooms.
So here we're on the moon for Ben Reichley's
end of semester project.
And so hubs became a building space where different kinds
of media assets, different kinds of class work was brought
for both class critiques, as well as an open studios event
which occurred at the very end of the semester.
And so literally
Ben took us to the moon here
and Ash jump forward a bit in the video.
So he was able to bring in different media components
from the coursework that he had done
throughout the semester.
And jump forward some more.
Okay, so here,
actually jump forward some more
about halfway through.
Great. So here in this screenshot, there would be audio
but it's it's muted for this.
So
here we have a critique, a class critique going on
so all the students and the professors and myself.
We are seeing the work of students live.
And so it's kind of a virtual classroom environment.
Each student made their own room
and took us around to show us their work.
And so Ash skip to close to the end
about halfway to the end.
And so here, this is a scene from open studios
and we had people from around the world
and here Ben is taking us around his room.
So we had people from around the world.
I had a friend in Tunisia, in a VR headset join us
if you, Ash, can you click
just before this
scroll back a little bit, keep going, keep going.
Right here. Perfect.
And so in addition to student rooms
we had the virtual Carson Center services
sort of central meeting place for the event.
We had a live DJ
and this is where people would congregate
enter into the open studios event.
And from here on the walls
you would see like posters of the students in their rooms.
So you can jump back to the presentation.
And the last thing
to mention.
Right now the videos are working.
Totally confused by technology here.
So the way that this works
and I want to just highlight this.
So we, we literally got the architectural 3d models
from the architects that design, or that sort of
rebuilt the building for the Johnny Carson Center
and using those architectural drawings.
We took them into Mozilla hubs.
Here's the exterior with three of us.
And the way that you work inside of hubs
there's really two ways.
One is within spoke.
So if you're familiar with unity or unreal game engines.
Spoke is hubs built-in browser-based
through creation tool where you can bring in your 3d assets
and place them like I did here
with the Carson Center 3d model from the architects.
And then also when you're inside
of a hubs room as an avatar, as we saw in video clips before
you can then also spawn or create video clips
and images to show.
Okay,
next,
I don't see Anna.
So Ash, do you want to jump ahead?
-: Sorry. I was muted. Here I am.
All right.
Hi everyone.
So we actually in fall of 2021.
So this is a different semester moving outside
of that event and open studios and critiques.
While I was teaching a story lab, all remote that last fall,
we use Mozilla hubs to reimagine the Haymarket,
a marketplace of the future in a hundred years.
So we drew from the history of markets.
Past as a bustling Depot here on the left,
the present a weekened farmer's market
and the future what it might be in a hundred years.
So
for most of my students
this was the first time that they've ever used hubs
as a tool for all phases of our project.
They were foundation first year students.
And so they, they began the process by writing
to a prompt or a design brief that I had given them.
And that briefs
I'm just going to read you the beginning of it.
So you get an idea of the project.
The year is 2120 and much of the world has changed
as we know it.
A new economic and government system
has re-invigorated Lincoln's Haymarket
and made it the primary way that humans get their food,
water and energy.
There are no more box stores, which have all been
neatly been converted to meet the needs of housing humans.
And so the prop continues on and you can imagine
but it became a jumping off point for people to
start writing prose and to start imagining their worlds.
So, first of all
what we did with some narrative previous visualization.
We created the architectural model, very exact
exact same way as Ben just showed in the last case
where model the model students
took screenshots and be- began collaging or drawing
over this to begin pre-visualizing what might be.
And so you can see on the left there's someone's vision
on the right another student's vision.
And we shared all of these ideas
into a Murrow board that let us begin
co-constructing the world.
So we got to see what all kinds of students
and we really did take a version
of the Haymarket train Depot to start doing this.
And so this became a place for us to brainstorm
and co-construct and co-create and co-author together.
Now, the next thing that happened was
that we had to do a little bit of creative solutioning.
Mozilla hubs like many different kinds
of online social VR platforms.
You do have bandwidth issues.
And so all the time we had to limit people in one room.
Also there's certain students, you know, working
in different rural environments that might not
have that strong of bandwidth.
So as a solution
we created an above ground and a below ground black market.
And this took students' ideas even further
in terms of storytelling.
It's a great example.
As, as Jesse set up in the very first part
of how limitations could turn into an affordance.
So the next thing we did was we set the scene
with props, design fictions.
Students were tasked with setting the scene by bringing
in these objects and signage that they felt important
to their story ideas and characters.
Here, we can see a student thinking about
Kanye west meditation on the left
and clone rights on the right.
So this design and hubs push many of their prose writing
what just was kind of stagnant on a page
to even further develop and became a generative space
for expanding on nascent story ideas.
We then embarked on live action role-playing
where students were asked to bring their characters in
as avatars and to act as them
as an improvisational form inside of hubs.
And students jumped back and forth
on both sides of the markets
from the black market to the above ground market
and new and interesting opportunities arose
for storytelling from both of these.
And over on the left.
You might see an actual image
of what we might think of as a lark or live action
role-play taking place in Finland
and on the right we see our students in
oh hay- haymarket
creating a- a character that's in the middle of a role-play
with another character in my classroom.
So after the role play
the students reflected on the entire process
and they began tweaking characters and ideas
and this process allowed
for an entirely new way to push their writing
and to get feedback from one another
about what was working and what wasn't working.
And finally students brought this work into the cinema space
by creating short scenes through screenwriting
that all spring out of the use of Mozilla hubs.
This process took us from the fall semester
into the spring semester where we picked up
on the hubs work.
We'd love to know if you have any question, ideas
or feedback for us,
and thank you for joining us
for this presentation this morning.
-: So there is one question so far,
the Todd asked
about second life as say an alternative or another medium.
Did we look at second life as a virtual environment
or others?
And would we have used this medium pre pandemic?
So I'll just jump in and say
to me, hubs is, has a leg up over second life
because it's hubs is so lightweight.
You simply, you can share a hubs link
like you would a zoom link
in the sense that you can share the link, drop it in
to your URL, and you're there.
You don't have to download second life.
You don't have to download anything.
And so it's very easy to access.
But it's also
it has fewer features.
And as to whether we would use this,
haven't used this before the pandemic,
I have known about hubs for
for going about a year prior to the pandemic.
And to me,
I hadn't found a great use case, honestly.
And I think the pandemic really kicked for me hubs into gear
as a great platform for remote interaction
when we had so little physical interaction, all of a sudden.
-: And I'll just add to that
because I have spent a lot of time
a long time ago in second life.
And I would say that the, the, the ease of use, I mean
it's a basic WASD keyboard, very different second life.
I mean, it, it, it takes the learning curve
to even figure out how to move around is, is a lot so.
I think it's, you know, I think we did have to
we thought about one of the things we had to do
for the open studios was think about best practices
for audiences who might have never played games before
and thinking about how to onboard them quickly.
So parents of students, et cetera, you know,
how can they use the WASD?
And those for more advanced users can actually put
on a headset and be in VR.
We have people dancing in VR
on the floor and stuff like that so.
-: Just, just a side point, we actually like
for the open studios wound up having a greeter
and a chaperone as well,
that would create
that onboarding experience and give a guided tour.
So that was quite interesting also.
-: Yeah. Like a concierge. Exactly.
So that people, when they show up are kind of like
I don't know what to do here.
Exactly. And
that I thought that was really great solution, too.
-: Beth's asking if we assign the students
their rooms from your hub.
their rooms from your hub. So, so this is kind of cool.
So, so this is kind of cool.
I, don't not sure if it showed up, but when, you know
when we did the open spheres project
in, in the material world,
first semester
students chose rooms that supported their work
meaning they had some sites specificity
or a student chose the atrium and projected on the ceiling.
So then in a similar way
students would select their rooms or spaces.
But what was different about hubs
is that you can select a corner of a room and then
that's a portal that transports you into another world
which can be a totally different environment.
And the example that Ben was showing,
Ben, one of our students had created a,
his location was on the moon.
So it had an entry point and then that would transport
or teleport everyone to this alternate environment.
So in a way it was, you know
the center plus
infinite possibilities.
-: So I did just drop into the chat
the actual room for the Carson Center so.
It's still live.
And that's one thing that I didn't mention is
that these Mozilla hubs rooms.
When you build them, they are perpetual
or as long as Mozilla hubs exists
and or Amazon web services exists, which hosts the room.
So check out the Carson center room, it's the room
from the event, which was now just over a year ago.
And you can still access all of the student rooms
from the main Carson Center room from the event.
So it's going to be pretty quiet
but the room is still open.
So you can go check it out for yourself.
-: I also just put in the linked to the Haymarket as well.
So you can, you can, and this is actually
since I got that link, you can probably see here
your choices here is to join a room
and turn on a device or just spectate.
Oh yeah.
Some people are joining right now.
And so this is you're entering in the
kind of underground market side,
but you can imagine that
it's not populated with the avatars or people.
So it is, it is a ghost town but
you can imagine what it was like when
when people were where we were in here
testing our characters and writing.
-: And this past season
for the Ian Thompson forum
design Morgan from the Carson Center.
He and I worked with Ian Thompson forum to
create a hubs sort of virtual rooms
for the Thompson, Ian Thompson forum speakers.
And so you can do a lot with live events as well
as well as asynchronous story world creation.
So once an event is created or once you have a room built
it will live on unless you delete it.
So it can have a sort of perpetual experience as well
in addition to being a live experience.
-: A quick question, did you actually meet,
meet like in class inside the world using audio
and video conferencing and that kind of thing as well?
-: Yeah, absolutely.
-: And, and one thing we forgot to mention
in the presentation is that
Ash and I had been trying to figure out
how to tie together two classes and this
allowed for this really interesting synergy and overlap
both being able to meet together and also cross-pollinate
sort of the directionality
of each course.
There's a question from Lissa.
Does hubs work with a screen reader
or other assistive technology?
Great question.
Ben, do you know?
-: So
I know very little,
I literally just did a Google search
to find an answer to the question and
the answer is yes it does.
I can't really tell you much about how it works,
but if you do a,
if you do a Google search for Mozilla hubs
and screen reader,
you will see some articles
about how to
what's possible.
That's where I would direct you.
-: Can I also just to throw us out, Melissa.
We, we, we got on the radar
of hubs for this project as a use case.
They considered it one of their favorite use cases.
And they came to the open studios and we are at
we actually did a tour with just hubs,
but I think the developing
developer team is quite open there.
And you could contact them for any, any ideas.
They'd probably be receptive of that.
-: Yeah. Apparently we were pushing their bandwidth
to new extremes.
-: On their, on the Mozilla hubs discord
I have seen people discussing,
discussing this.
But I haven't looked into it in depth
but people are doing work
with assistive technologies and hubs.
-: I'd like to thank Ben and Ash and Jesse
for tasting presentation.
Thank you for doing this and sharing your stories.
You know, this is pretty amazing stuff that we can do this.
And I think it likely meets the students
where they're coming in, right.
And then intriguing, and their ability to kind of engage.