Everything
My thoughts.
23rd October 2024
Satisfaction.
Here are some things I like so far about Rust.
- Ownership rules : Rust deallocates heap data when its owner goes out of scope. Ownership can be transferred through moves. Heap data can only be accessed through its owner.
- Break values: A loop can evaluate to a value.
18th October 2024
Bouncing a recent post by Daniel Holden.
Some game directors think of games like movies, so that year after year the main focus of animation research should be achieving the highest fidelity virtual humans in order to perfectly digitize their actors.
And this is understandable. Directors know that acting is a great art and it brings value to the game insofar that the performance brings the characters to life. If the actor happens to be well-known then there is an incentive for their digitization to respect their performance. Indeed people connect to the puppeteer as much as they connect to the puppet.
While this is certainly an interesting goal, this is not a sustainable line of research. There is after all a true end goal, which is the realisation of an interactive digital experience that is totally indistinguishable from real life. The end goal is to equip the actor and the animator with the ability to work in tandem to take total control over a performance.
None of this is easy, and the technical problems will keep us busy and paid for maybe the next fifty years. The question for the discipline after our tools have been open-sourced and we have documented everything we know : What are we to do next? How can we use our knowledge of animation to continue to generate value?
My guess is that we will enter an era of bespoke animation design, but this is only possible in an economy that values diverse artistic expressions. In some manner, the programmer must become an artist. This will probably cause the number of people in the discipline to drop, as technical-minded individuals move on to other problems. But ideally, whoever is left is truly innovating on the notion of animation, however that turns out to look like.
In any case, I believe that there needs to be more spaces for creative programming in general.
3rd October 2024
Night-time rendering.
Did you know you could ask your library to order a book? I didn't. And then I did. This week I have Projective Geometric Algebra: Illuminated on my desk. The notion I'm pursuing is to have fun in the evenings translating the math into a Rust project. In other news, I have met a language exchange partner for Chinese. He's PhD candidate in education technology from Guangdong.
11th September 2024
Resting anxiety.
No link this time, but a small anecdote about a conversation I had in Fribourg's beautiful riverside old town with a treasured friend. In her recent visit to Japan, she had mentioned to her host that she intended to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. The very next day, her host insisted on driving them an hour south for a particular view which was particularly spectacular. She explained then what she did not understand at the time: To appreciate the beauty of the flowing sakura and to understand that it must end is the way to joy, life, and light. To this perspective on things I believe I must hasten myself.
30th August 2024
Background reading.
I have come across a paper from Manos Kamarianakis and George Papagiannakis that leverages Conformal Geometric Algebra for skeletal animation. I believe it is the only one of its kind.
28th August 2024
A language for animation.
Since my last post I have been resting in Greece, pressing grapes and eating feta cheese. In the meantime I came across a fascinating theory of geometric algebra for conformal motions, and a book on the topic by Eric Lengyel. I believe that one could potentially write a highly simplified skeletal animation system in this new language, and it should be the first step on my research track in character animation. Exciting!
15th August 2024
Becoming five-head.
I have struggled with sleep and have had an internet addiction for most of my life. In my search for tools to surmount my obstacles, I found Dr. Alok Kanojia, who has the gift of explaining ideas from psychotherapy to the layman. In his latest video he goes over three concepts from psychotherapy. Acceptance, diffusion, and self as context. This set of ideas is very compelling to me, and I learned that it is primarily through meditation that these tools can appear in your life. In the past however, closing myself in with my thoughts tended to make them unbearably loud. But hey, that's okay. I'll just try again.
14th August 2024
A few goodbyes.
I have finished reading Babel. The drama is excellent and the narrative came together really well in the end. Sadly, in my view it is weakened by an annoying habit of the author of taking all of the speculation out of speculative fiction, leaving the characters completely one-dimensional. I wish I could laugh along Robin, instead of being told plainly that he found a joke funny, it would have served the story better. That's okay, however, because the mystery and world-building are really compelling to me. Still, it's not a must-read.
12th August 2024
Speculative fiction.
This weekend I finished reading the second book in the Otori trilogy and have begun reading the young adult speculative fiction book Babel. Although the writing is much more creative in the former, the themes of the latter feel much more important to me now, carried by the genius premise of sorcery through what is lost in translation. I felt gratified I could understand some of the Chinese, and I was happy to learn some colonial history. I realised I had very little awareness for how the era of European coloniasm affects the sentiment of people from different nations today. I also realise today that my own Ionian island of Kefalonia had once been an "amicable protectorate" of the British Empire, though I have no conception yet for what that actually meant for my ancestors.
9th August 2024
My origins. Gardening.
I have my first research question. Could it be possible to leverage a learned motion manifold to perform tangent-curve optimisation in such a way that it encourages realistic motions? I must plan, I must pursue. Tonight I glanced at the wikipedia pages for the Ionian Islands. Is it my duty to understand where I'm from? Maybe someone knows. Anyway, this summer I want to create a video game with my twin brother.
8th August 2024
Quaternion averaging. Dual quaternions.
I've been planting my seeds. I am going to try to return to Ubisoft La Forge with an idea for a master's project. So I am going to study the landscape of 3D animation and see what's missing. My initial idea was about general linkages, but I feel that there is much to do on the skeletal transfer side.
3rd August 2024
Student protests. Maximum likelihood estimates. Water bellows.
I have been reading a bit of Feynman every day. His clear explanations are making up for my poor chemistry education. I have also been playing EarthBound for the first time, it's astounding how much Undertale is cut from the same stone.
1st August 2024
Smile :D
I have been putting a lot of work into my dreams and hobbies. It's quite hard to keep it all going strong but I believe it's fundamental to how I want to live my life.
30th July 2024
Linkages. Grass. Earthbound.
Yesterday's plan was immediately curtailed, because I think advanced linkage systems are potentially underrated for video games.
29th July 2024
Girls are wizards. Feynman lectures.
So I've had the seed of an idea to start doing some physics. My thought is to see if the habit sticks. What is an atom?
28th July 2024
Peter Thiel.
I tried meditating on the feeling of nothing this morning. It's going to need some more time I think. I also beat a level in Baba Is You that I've been attempting on-and-off for years. Pretty proud of that one.
27th July 2024
Geometric Langlands program.
One of my dreams is to understand some of the biggest ideas in physics and mathematics. Maybe I should spend some time setting a goal for myself, and then just enjoy the ride.
26th July 2024
AI silver IMO medal. Soft vector quantization.
I have been interested in data compression recently, and have been wondering what the best way to compress a polyline in three dimensions might be.
25th July 2024
The Nanking massacre, evolving together, and an amazing achievement.
One year ago, my friend from told me that she could not forgive the Japanese for the Sino-Japanese wars. Today I read Iris Chang's book on the Nanking. How terrible.
23rd July 2024
East German intelligence service, a children's cartoon, and measure theory things.
I'm preparing for a class on Measure Theory in September. Somehow my classmates always seem to find these things easier than me.
Image by Erik Desmazières - La Bibliothèque de Babel
Orfeas Liossatos