Month: July 2026

VJ Show Impression

In this VJ set for the live performance of the song “The Set Up” from 1980, the VJ uses short flashing sequences that alternate between a person and a vampire, visually echoing the song’s underlying tension and sense of entrapment introduced earlier. As the music gradually becomes darker and more vampiric, the Vampire in the VJ set seems to be getting closer to the human, increasing the sense of imminent danger, as if the “set up” is reaching its inevitable conclusion.

The choice of colors for the sequences is made deliberately: black and white to create that old-school vampire movie style, a cold blue tone for the vampire sequences, and sometimes yellow/orange or red for the sequences that include the human, creating a visual contrast that reinforces the narrative. This hints at the coldness of the vampiric creature, that it is undead, and in contrast, the human’s body is flowing with warm blood, making the image resemble a heat camera, further intensifying the sense of vulnerability and exposure introduced in the song’s atmosphere.

In combination with the music and light show (also without), this VJ set tells a story, going through the exposition, a climax and finally the resolution, seamlessly translating the sonic narrative into a visual one. This is the kind of artistic expression that I aim to go for as well, where sound and image are not separate elements but parts of one cohesive storytelling system. Therefore, the evening was highly inspiring and moreover, it made it seem so much more tangible and accessible, bridging the gap between conceptual idea and practical execution. I already had these ideas to make VJ sets with typical movie structures in mind within the production process, but now it is no longer just an idea in my head, but a concrete direction for future work. I know that it is achievable and that the idea can tell a good story at a music event.

After the show, I was so inspired that I went up to the VJ and had a talk with him about his performance that night. He was extremely kind and eager to show me his tools that he used and recommended me some software and websites for VJs. This also gives me a positive feeling for VJing as the community is very open and shares tools, software and many visuals for others to use and have fun with.
As Markus Zimmermann always said in class: go and meet your heroes.

I wanted to take the opportunity and use this blogpost to talk about the topic of interviews for my research.

In class, we conducted interviews with each other – originally aimed at practicing how to handle an interview situation, which pointers to have in mind, how to interact with the interview partner and how to document the talk. I have to admit, however, that for me it turned out to be not just valuable as a practice opportunity but actually helped me in figuring out some key questions that I want/need to ask in my research. Furthermore, the talk with my interview partner already offered some interesting insights and new approaches I had not yet fully considered.

The interview I conducted was all about the topic of science communication with the following questions being at the center of the conversation:

• Of course, it is a very large field, but are you generally interested in science and research?
• Are there areas that are of special interest to you?
• Which sources do you use for getting information about (scientific) topics?
• Which formats do you find interesting?
• How do you like content that is, for instance, being presented via social media, in podcasts or posters?
• Can you think of any platforms/accounts/creators that are focused on scientific content?
• Do you follow science platforms / accounts / creators?
• If you get in touch with a scientific topic, for instance through a fun fact, are you interested in exploring the topic further?

Essentially, I wanted to find out about my interview partner’s personal experiences and opinions about the general topic of science communication formats. I was particularly interested if, and if yes which, science communication channels are interesting for the other person.

Although I tried to be neutral when I asked my questions, I was hoping for answers that support my general opinion on the potential of science communication formats and I was pleased to see that, at least in this case, I was under the impression that I am on the right track with my topic. 

To give a short recap and analysis of the interview: the interview partner, while not having a specific interest in science topics, showed general curiosity and openness to them. He stated the platform YouTube, in particular, as the main source of engaging with science content. Even though he is  not specifically searching for that kind of content, he has come across it through, for example, the suggested videos page and by now does follow some accounts and creators that he has learned to value for their appealing treatments of scientific topics. The way these creators present their topics and the trust in their reliability that accumulated over time are pivotal in the interview partner’s willingness to consume such specific content, the topics themselves not even mattering as much as the knowledge that a certain channel or person will present them in an appealing way.

Overall, the interview was extremely helpful for shifting my attention to YouTube as an important platform for educational content and gave me some ideas as to what matters when getting people to watch/consume scientific content. It leads me to believe that the „how“ is more important than the „what“. While the „what“ is something I believe is crucial when deciding which topics could be worth knowing about, the „how“ probably is an extremely important subject, especially in the beginning, where building trust with the public community might be more important than instantly teaching about complex issues. Furthermore, the way a topic is being presented can make or break the viewer’s interest. Essentially, it does not matter what one is talking about, it could be the most theoretical, boring information but if it is presented with enthusiasm, made to be entertaining, interesting and/or impressive, people can get inspired by it. Of course, the same is valid the other way around – viewers could lose interest in the most interesting topic if the presentation lacks all the attributes mentioned above. 

I will definitely conduct further interviews to see which touch points are natural for people and what platforms and formats currently matter to them. 

For that purpose, I put together a questionnaire that I just published as part of this blog posts topic. (If you are reading this, feel free to complete the survey, I would appreciate anyone taking the time to do so!)

It picks up on the questions I asked in my test interview with a bit more It is currently open for answers in the hopes of getting more insights that will help me create better science focused content. 

The survey can be found here: 

https://forms.gle/1JAfiZ1cRcrFZUqQ7

After I finished the rig I wanted to play a bit with it. So I chose to pause the tutorial for one blog post. I animated the spider ball with the intention of showing off most of its features. I went back to the basics and animated a bouncing ball. I tried using the feature of blender to simulate a bounce with the interpolation method. However, it caused more problems than it helped. It never had contact with the ground except at the end and you could not manually adjust the height. Since it is an interpolation type it would generate the bounce between the new keyframes again and destroy the intended bounce. So I switched back to manually animating it. I went with switching the interpolation to stepped in the beginning­ – something we were taught in the bachelor to do. It is a lot easier to get the timing right with the stepped mode. I started with only animating the the x and y direction. Then I added the spin and at the end the squash and stretch.

As for the other movements I wanted to show off the head and the possibility of moving it like BB8 in Star Wars. So the ball rolls in, looks at the cam and rolls out again.

Last but not least I let my buddy show his full pride. He is all grown up ready for anything with its handguns.

It is a very quick animation and I normally would go over it again several times but as I only wanted it to show off its capability I am happy with the little showcase I created. The only thing I think the rig is missing, are some sort of eye lids or shutter for the head. You could immediatly create more emotions by adding them.

In the tutorial was only one step left. The rig got a UI with the help of python. A premade script was provided so it was easy to change for the needs of the individual rig. It essentially reads out the bone collections and their visibility of the armature. For that the armature needed to get a new custom property. The tutorial used a random string generator. A string is a combination of letters and numbers. This string was used as a rig id in the python script. With this it could find the right rig.

I have done some programming before which helps to not feel overwhelmed it. Despite me not having worked with python specifically, my creative coding lessons helped me to not feel lost. Even without the tutorial I could kind of understand what is happening. For the tutorial itself I only needed to change the names of the bone collection to what I had named them. One thing to remember for python is, that the rows and their structure is important. You can’t just indent a line. It will cause problems. By hitting text and then register the python script is now loading automatically with the blender file.

Conclusion

I am really happy with this rig. As far as I have tested it, everything works great. I appreciate how neat and structured everything is. Rigging can be a hassle and there is no need to cause yourself more problems by working half assed. I got reminded of this again, when a friend of mine had asked me to play doctor for her rig. It had at one point worked, but she could not move the IK arms anymore. I was so confused looking through the rig, trying to understand what was happening. Nothing was named correctly beginning with the whole armature which was called Leg1. I figured out, that she created the rig directly on the deformation bones. That alone caused tons of issues. Later I realized that she used rigify which apparently is known to create such issues. I found a weird bad work around for her rig and I created a video for her. It is not recommended to do what I did, but for fun I post it here as well.

Still now something was very off with her weight painting. Or has it always been off? I don’t know, but it reminded me of how little time I had during my bachelor’s for rigging. Creating a nice clean rig with enough time to struggle on some point wasn’t in the curriculum.  

So much for my rigging journeyso far. Meanwhile, enjoy my bot showing off his rig’s abilities.  😉

We continue with the arms. Like the legs, they also use an IK-system. It is a lot of repeating steps while rigging. Especially if you have four legs and two arms. For the arms the tutorial didn’t use a pole vector. With the way the arms are placed, there will not be a lot of popping, or it will not be visible. Again, a limit distance was used same as the legs. The only real difference to the legs was the creation of its custom shape. For the shape I created a plane and deleted the face with pressing X (only the face). I assigned the plane as the bones custom shape and aligned the plane in object mode with the placement of the bone. This way I can directly adjust the shape and can see it on the object. With the snap tool on I followed the form of the arm.
As for the gun and magazine both got a Limit Distance Constraint as well as custom shapes. The tutorial used arrows indicating the direction you can use. One rule for rigging is, if you don’t want an aspect to be animated later, lock it. For the gun and magazine everything was locked except one.

Since the arms where a repeat to the legs, the most complicated part this time was the head. The set up itself was easy enough, create a ne bone and put a Damped Track Constraint on it. The head will now follow this bone as if it is looking at it. However, since we want to be able to switch it off, it was time to spend some time on drivers. Drivers use small python operators and functions to create certain rules. For example, if I move a car, its wheels rotate. In this case the rotation is influenced by the x transformation. For our head we will create custom properties which will work like an on and off switch. To get back to the tutorial for the head I listened to a 50 minutes lecture about all of this.

Essentially, we want to be able to switch off the head following the body as well as the aim following the body. With this you can make the little robot roll like BB8 from Star Wars. We create to custom properties for each. To be able to switch between these modes, more mechanical bones with different copy transforms were created. The custom properties drive the influence of each copy transform. Last step again is to create custom shapes for the aim symbol, the head as well as adding a bone with stretch to to get the connecting line between head and aim point. It sounds so easy when I think back, but the execution took quite a while. Especially because somewhere in the tutorial was a mistake and I had to look through the comments to get the same result as he has later. Still, it works great now.

On the legs and the arms, we used a limit distance constraint, which works fine if you never plan on scaling the character. But what if? For that case some adjustments where made. One of the mechanical bones was used as a base. The head of the bone was snapped to the hand bone and then got the stretch to constraint as well as a limit scale. The scale is how far the arm can stretch out. Now the IK-arm bone gets the limit distance removed and gets instead a copy location. The copy location copies the stretched arm bone. In the constraint you can switch between the tail or head of the bone. We need the head for this. The legs have a slightly more complicated process (new bone etc.) but the principle is the same. The ball can now be scaled 😊

One little step is still missing. The Bolts or panels don’t have a rig yet, but since they should only be able to rotate in the y-aches they only got everything locked accept the y-aches. Also, they got custom shapes.

Another little fix for the legs was needed. At the beginning the stretch and squash was created. This causes with extreme poses some issues with the IK-legs and arms. The solution is a driver. We only want the IK active when the transforms are higher than a certain number. With this the stretching is fine again.

For the last step some clean up was needed. For example, the bone groups were split into left legs and right legs etc. Some unused values were also locked.

What Has Changed Since the First Prototype

After creating the first prototype, I added more pages:

• pages for song recommendations, including the title, artist, who recommended it, and why I love this song so much
• a cover
• interactive pages to fill out together

The interactive pages are meant for people to fill out togehter. They are placed in a horizontal layout so both persons can write at the same time. Person A fills out the spread about person B based on assumptions and person B does the same thing for person A. After that they can compare if what they thought was true. This allows them to get to know each other on a fun and playful base and start a follow up conversation about it if they want to engage with each other even more. This interface facilitates the interaction on several levels: Not only is the barrier to approaching a stranger very low, but the interaction also has a clear beginning and end, which makes it more manageable and predictable. In addition, in my experience, people are generally curious to know what others think of them, and they enjoy observing others and coming up with stories and assumptions about them. What could potentially have a negative impact on the experience are negative stereotypes and prejudices, which might be hurtful to some people. I believe it’s essential to emphasize respectful behavior in the instructions for the interactive pages.

I decided to expand the first prototype rather than redesign it completely because the core concept had already proven to be working. The initial prototype adressed one of the main challenges I had identified: lowering the barrier to approaching strangers on long-distance train journeys. Instead of starting from scratch, I wanted to build on this and explore how the experience could become more engaging.

Topic overview and open questions

In my previous blog posts, I’ve tried to explore the topic as broadly as possible and cover everything that came to mind regarding observation. Because the scope of the topic has become so broad, there are still a few open questions that I’d like to address over the summer. Here is a list of the questions and sub-topics that came up during my research but that I haven’t been able to answer yet, so I don’t lose them:

• the psychological effects of constant observation
• the concept of social presence
• feeling observed vs. feeling seen
• voyeurism and stalking
• observation amongst women
• the male gaze
• the objectification of women and it’s consequnces in relation to being observed
• digital observation and data collection
• Big Brother (?), not sure yet
• observation in regimes (e.g. DDR)
• observation in modern literature (George Orwell: 1984, Dave Eggers: The Circle)
• smart glasses and how they impact the feeling of being observed
• regarding hidden cameras in public restrooms:
  • Who is responsible?
  • How can the installation of hidden cameras be prevented?
  • What role can design play?
  • Analyzing interactions on public toilets -> How can they be improved so women feel saver?
  • Can public spaces ever feel truly private?
  • Do hidden cameras create distrust for public spaces?
  • What does it mean if people cannot return the gaze of their observer?

Planning future research

My main goal is to do more research on the topics listed above to find out what aspect of observation interests me most. I think that, by focusing on observation as a form of passive interaction and on hidden cameras, I’ve already identified two key areas that interest me a lot and that I’d like to explore further. Still, it would certainly be helpful to gain a general overview of the entire subject area.

In october / november I want to narrow the topic down to a specific research question that I can then focus on.

Literature collection

To get a head start on my research for the summer, I’ve already begun collecting relevant literature. I used ChatGPT to generate a list of keywords, which I then used to search the OPAC of the Augsburg University Library. I’ll also need to order some of the books through the Bavaria-wide interlibrary loan service. Since I’ll be spending most of the summer break at my parents’ house, this was the most logical choice for me, as it’s only 40 km from there to Augsburg, giving me easier access to the literature on site. Nevertheless, I also found a few books at the library in Graz that I’m sure I’ll be able to get my hands on as well. Here is a list of the works I was able to find during my initial search:

• Spiekermann, Sarah (2016). Ethical IT innovation: a value-based system design approach. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
• Klar, Manuel (2012). Datenschutzrecht und die Visualisierung des öffentlichen Raums. LIT.
• Öztürk, Fatih (2022). Self and subjectivity in the twentieth century dystopian fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Hijmans, Hielke (2016). The European Union as guardian of internet privacy. Springer
• Kumpf, Benjamin (2017). Smart Cars – eine datenschutzrechtliche Analyse. Verlag Dr. Kovač
• Richter, Volker (2009). Beobachtet und bewertet werden. LIT
• Carah, Nicholas (2021). Media & society: power, platforms, & participation. SAGE
• Klamt, Martin (2007). Verortete Normen: öffentliche Räume, Normen, Kontrolle und Verhalten. VS Verl. Für Sozialwiss.
• Lefkeli, Deniz (2026). The Corporate Gaze: The Impact of Data Collection on Consumer Behaviour. Palgrave Macmillan
• Schmitt, Martin (2026). Internet im Kalten Krieg: Eine Vorgeschichte des globalen Kommunikationsnetzes. transcript
• Goffman, Erving (2009). Interaktion im öffentlichen Raum. Campus Verlag
• Goffman, Erving (2014). Verhalten in sozialen Situationen: Strukturen und Regeln der Interaktion im öffentlichen Raum. Birkhäuser
• Hahl, Olaf (1986). Alltagskommunikation im öffentlichen Raum: verbale Begegnungen zwischen Fremden. [Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin West]

I’ve highlighted the most important sources in bold; the others may only be relevant in a marginal way.