The Art of Research – A History by Vi Hart | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Research – A History by Vi Hart

theartofresearch.org

165 pointsanonymfus17 comments

Everything I see in this post looks wonderfully healthy for the human spirit. But it also looks so insufferable for me personally. Which is why I'm so delighted that people like Vi Hart exist. And more broadly speaking, why there's beauty in the diversity of humans. You make your beautiful mathematical ribbon dances and I'll seek the beauty in my software architecture design.

I appreciated the article but was feeling the same way.

Mainly the portion about working primarily in VR and refurnishing the lab for reclining on the floor as a result. It's interesting, but foreign to me. Strange Days and Existenz are cool movies and all, but I just don't find VR that compelling.

I'm glad someone is working to find meaningful experiences in these new mediums though.

M Eifler has been experimenting and creating stuff in VR pretty much every day and has been for years. I consider them a super creative pioneer and they really have an embodied sense of what works in VR. http://elevr.com/the-office-of-the-future/ It's the kind of mastery of a medium that comes from "serious play", where someone's not afraid to just explore new ideas for the sense of discovery. And they keep notes on what works and what doesn't. http://elevr.com/would-you-like-to-see-an-invisible-sculptur...

I wish basic research like this was funded to the hilt, and that VR designers actually read the results, just to see that they don't have to invent interaction design from scratch.

Huh, such different perspectives indeed. The concept of a VR workshop is a dream for me. It may have nowhere near the same fidelity as reality, but it solves one important problem: tools and material.

There's plenty of stuff I'd love to tinker with that's just way too expensive and/or take too much time to acquire. For instance, there are some 3D constructions I'd play with, but I don't have a 3D printer (it's a PITA to operate, and I gave pieces of my last one to a hackerspace anyway). I have some ideas for a hardware product I'd like to test out, but no SMD soldering skills, no space for it, none of the more expensive electronics debugging tools, and one or two components in the initial design that are expensive and would take a month to ship. I could afford it, but I can't justify it. I couldn't afford it when I first came up with an idea. I can't imagine your average teenage tinkerer affording it either.

Now imagine that in a half-decent VR environment with real physics, a circuit designer and a basic circuit simulator, I could build a simulacrum of my project in hours, and then iterate on it even faster. I could build and throw away 100s of prototypes, for free and without waiting for parts. In the end, I'd have some idea whether the project is worth making real, and I'd have circuit designs and firmware to test out in the real world.

Speaking of environments, I've been in love with Bret Victor's "Seeing Spaces" idea for a while[0]. I thought long and hard about what it would take to build one in our hackerspace, and realized that this idea needs a lot of prototyping beforehand. Given a set of measurements on the thing you're doing (and the imprecision of the way they're collected), will it be helpful? Will the way it's displayed be annoying? Does it let you explore the project space faster? What kind of affordances can be provided? It dawned to me that it doesn't make sense to start shopping for actual hardware to test it all out - VR could be used to quickly test concepts and gain a good idea of which solutions would work instead.

Now I'm slowly saving up for VR hardware that will work well with my (rather strong) correction glasses...

[0] - http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/

This doesn't make sense to me at all. Surely you could prototype faster with existing EDA tools that some VR tool where you "built" the circuit in VR. You can already do sophisticated simulation without VR, you don't need a VR environment to do what you describe as basic circuit simulation.

And you will need electronics debugging tools in the end when you want to actually build the item, unless it will remain only in the VR environment.

There's very little novelty in what VR provides - it just provides a significant enhancement in the experience

Also, limitations can breed efficiency - by being constrained to a 2D projection, the interactions are simplified and streamlined

VR provides the same goals and expects utility (fun, efficiency) from the process.

Its fun and interesting, but I haven't seen anything groundbreaking.

Frankly, I think VR and FB are a good match for another reason - they both provide an overwhelming, dissociating experience

This can be a boon, but like sugar and opiates I worry that they're more social or sensory information than we can take in chronically - unfortunately, huge amounts of money and thought and technology is aimed at maximizing our intake to pad coffers.

I'm not sad AR/VR adoption is lacklustre

Have you tried 6DOF VR? There are a ton of issues with current VR systems but your comment makes it seem like your only reference point is sci-fi movies...

No, seems like its becoming more mainstream so maybe this year I will try it. But screens attached to your eyes can only be so compelling. At least in the movies it makes sense to work in these truly immersive environments. Working with an HMD sounds like hell.

> Despite how inexpensive, powerful, and ubiquitous computers have become, very few of the ideas floating around in technology today are better than the ideas from half a century ago, and quite a few are quite a bit worse.

Stand-out line from a fantastic essay. There are so many fruit to harvest that only now seem low-hanging because the hardware has gotten better. See: RNNs, for example. There has been a lot of thought about how the future could look; it's worth paying attention to it.

>when Evelyn shared a document about critique in art and how we could apply those techniques for CDG’s research. Up until then, I was thinking of the connection between art and research as something fuzzy and cultural, as if artists just happen to be good researchers due to some instinct for creativity, or that art gives us life and soul that helps to motivate interesting ideas.

I don't classify myself as an artist but the cited document is wonderful!

Vi Hart if you're out there somewhere, thank you for writing this! I've been a big fan of your work for a while and this was a delight to read.

[1] http://elevr.com/portfolio/art-based-research/ [bonus] http://elevr.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/CritatCDG.pdf

What was a standout result of her research in VR? What was the important question that she posed? Did she come to an answer?

I read through some of the posts on elevr, and I wasn't able to find something that jumped out at me, like Bret Victor's talks and posts did for me. Did anyone else?

She works at Microsoft now [1]? Didn't see that coming.

I wonder what a researcher at the Office of the CTO at Microsoft does.

[1] https://theartofresearch.org/contact-us/

CTO's personal experimentation/prototype team? Like mini skunkworks for experiments that benefit from and ought to have zero bureaucracy. That's what I'd ask for if I were high enough up the chain. "give me a 5 person squad of elites and the mandate to point them at anything at all."

I really enjoy reading Vi Hart, and I had to think of a hobby I picked up recently, which is Super Mario Maker on the Nintendo Wii U. It's not quite Turing complete, but the complexity it brings forth really gets me thinking into similar directions. And if I'm now imagining a full-fledged programming environment in a Jump-and-Run world, I'm quite sure bringing all this into the third dimension would be mind-boggling.

Also, there were attempts to bring computational complexity to MineCraft once? What happened to this stuff? Did it ever evolve past simple experiments? I imagine puzzles, the kind you can find in SMM, but in a somehow self-aware MineCraft environment, where when you do X, entire walls rearrange to give way to another cave. Maybe this would remove some of the open world aspects of the game, but still be pretty amazing.

I support Vi Hart via Patreon.

You can too:

https://www.patreon.com/vihart

Interesting read! I would have liked more details about what specifically they found useful about artistic methods of inquiry. Hart writes that they were able to isolate certain patterns of thought; what were those?

She wasn't kidding about it being very well documented at elevr.com, but I'll link a few posts here.

http://elevr.com/studio-metaphor-an-embodied-software-paradi...

http://elevr.com/body-friendly-design-for-turntable-games/

http://elevr.com/some-rather-different-social-vr-experiments...

http://elevr.com/yoga-for-building-vr-tolerance/

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