10```Coming Together
7.22-7.28
1
Portfolio Progress
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I produced three more paintings!---that are not done. Before I started the 4th one of the week, I got an email from my admission officer at the program I’m applying to, and he very very kindly offered to take a look at my progress and give me feedback.
His feedback was really helpful. And part of it was basically asking me to stop making more drawings and paintings, and just focus my energy on polishing what I already have. So I changed up the colors of two drawings from last week by quites a lot, and I still have to add a lot of details in the next three days.... oh god...
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2
Why is VR not as popular as people had imagined it to be??
some notes about VR and gaming from my conversation with my friend’s friend
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1. [Moatboat](http://www.moatboat.com/) you speak and it creates a world for you
2. “I would only want a VR headset if VR gets out of just being about games, if I can work with it”
3. VR v.s. ....
1. Netflix:
VR is more immersive and demandin. Blocking out other visual info (the very idea of “going into another world”) inherently limits situations where you can use it
2. Xbox & Wii: VR doesn’t have their social experience
3. theater: VR also lacks the social aspect of theater in terms of watching something with a lot of other people; it also lacks the ritualistic feeling of going to a specific place at a specific time to watch something with other people
4. How do you interact with the real world through VR
1. [AltspaceVR Inc | Be there, together.](https://altvr.com/)
2. Engaging with real senses
3. Bret Victor is very much against VR because of this…[Bret Victor, beast of burden](http://worrydream.com/)
5. High frame rate films: you actually see how fake it is. same thing with super high resolution films
1. Your brain makes things more real by filling up, with imagination, the gaps of lower frame rate movies
2. So VR could be the high frame rate film with MR — it goes too far out of comfort zone to be incorporated into the life of a large population
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3
Making the Crowd Smarter
notes from a talk by Wharton professor that I forgot to share last week
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If you give a group of people a question like: “is philadelphia the capital of Pennsylvania?” (the right answer is: no) What is the best chance for the group to agree on the right answer?
There could be three ways to do this:
1. Ask everyone what their answer would be. Then choose what the majority chooses.
2. Ask everyone what their answer would be, AND ask everyone how confident they are about their answer. Then choose an answer that balances the best between the amount of votes and the confidence behind the votes
3. Ask everyone what their answer would be, AND ask how many people they think would agree with their answer. Then choose the answer that is surprisingly popular. This means that if answer “No” has A2 number of votes, and P2 percentage on average that voters (for the answer “No”) predicted, then “No” is very likely to be the right answer.
So, basically, when people think that less people agree with them, but in fact there are more people that share the same answer than those people predicted, then that most likely will be the right answer.
Turns out, even with a small group, when methods #1 and #2 fail horribly, method #3 still has really high accuracy.
The professor, John McCoy, did a really quick mathematical explanation of why #3 works, but I didn’t get it. I probably also did a bad job of explaining this thing, so here’s a link to a World Economic Forum article on the same thing.
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Another life update
I spent the entire weekend sitting in a library and four different coffee shops writing a paper draft, and the draft is almost done!!!! I realized on Friday that I could look for open calls for anthologies, and found one that really suits my research interest. They have a deadline for proposals next Monday, and the final articles will be due a month after. But because the proposal could literally be 2000 words long, I’m basically writing an initial draft for my article to submit.
The writing process was quite brutal at first, because I felt inadequate in what I was doing. My research this summer is essentially connecting the dots between several disciplines. Although there certainly are past writings on “sublime architecture,” there hasn’t been a lot of research on the same topic from the neuroscience perspective. Plus, I’m not looking at *sublime* architecture exactly. I didn’t have any single prototype article to start my research with, and with writing, it seemed intimidating to write something I haven’t seen. I felt I still had so much more to read before I could claim anything legitimate...
But I sort of. got over that by thinking that writing is part of my learning process, too. I have to write something now so that what I’ve learned through reading in the past month won’t go away too quickly, in a sense. And I’ll let the people working for the publications decide how legitimate / worthy what I write is for their publications.
In fact, at some point of writing, I started to enjoy the process. The goal of writing something in a few days oriented my mind in a different way when I searched for sources. I’m learning a lot more efficiently, in one way, than I have been for a while.
So, we’ll see! We’ll see how that goes.
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5
Imagining other possibilities
just wendi daydreaming
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At some point this week, I somehow discovered a job on LinkedIn: a game researcher for Tencent in their Los Angeles location. Requirement for the job: you have to be really passionate about playing games. To my understanding, it looked like a job where you have to play lots of games and browse through all kinds of gaming communities across platforms to identify trends in the industry. Well, I can’t apply and I’m definitely not qualified for the job, but somehow knowing that this job exists made me happy.
And I started searching (not actually searching tho) for jobs that I potentially could do in the creative industries on LinkedIn. Discovered a historical research position for a very cool VR experience design company, programming intern for Tribeca film festival, etc, etc. Entertained myself by imagining doing these kinds of jobs in my gap year and the kinds of possibilities that would open up for me in each of those situations. I don’t know. Daydreaming is fun.
When I watched the taco episode on Ugly Delicious Sunday night, I paused the video maybe 10 times to search for cooking classes/tours/workshops/schools in different cities in Mexico. It just looked like there are so many cool and fresh ingredients that you can get in Mexico to experiment with in cooking!! So I imagined somehow finding a place to stay for a long time in Mexico to explore cooking...
Today, which is Monday the 29th, I found out about Space for Humanity. It’s an initiative that’s looking for 5-8 people across the world to travel to space in two years and come back to make some kind of positive impact for the world. I got really excited about that, before I realized the type of work I can do is not what they’re looking for people to do when they come back from time in space. Well, it’s still cool I imagined traveling to space though!
While I don’t like how I’m so bad with actually executing things and not staying in my head all the time, I still cherish moments like these when I kind of just daydream about different life opportunities I could take. I believe that when some crazy opportunities that are actually right for me come up, the daydreams I’ve had will make it easier for me to take the crazy opportunities, because I’ve imagined crazier ones!
