Please come in, feel free to take off your jacket and stay awhile. I’m Steve by the way. I don’t have a great story to tell, but I plan to one day. For now I just want to take my time and learn so that I can compose something worth telling. Graduate school was always an exciting thought for me, but I figured I would take some time in industry before I went back. After things shut down I figured then that it would be nice to have some stability back in my life. But I’m not just here for some stability, I’m here to learn and grow.
There’s an old adage about knowing what you don’t know. That which lies between hearing a name and the deep well of information it entails. I know I don’t know a lot. That’s why I like research, because I get to find out. There’s so many topics I would be interested in learning about. Over the pandemic I was livestreaming every Friday with my friends doing improv. Unfortunately that didn’t work so well over zoom. So we had to, wait for it, IMPROVISE. We learned how to make our show look good by adding in scenes and imagery and animations, which weren’t the primary use of the streaming software we used. That improved the look of our stream greatly and it made things more fun. So how could we improve engagement in the stream more? How do other streamers improve their engagement? What crazy tech have other streamers come up with? A few names such as SushiDragon and DandiDoesIt stick out in my mind for having wild tech in their streams. They have automated animations which play when viewers in the chat do specific actions. Those two specifically are more dance related, but what could you do with an educational stream? These are all questions I want to explore as live streaming grows as an art form. Personal interests aside I am interested in research and design of spaces and educational technology.
Digging a bit further into the two examples from streaming I mentioned earlier, there are some interesting things they do. For one, SushiDragon has some crazy things that he can do. He has motion tracking cameras to make sure none of the action gets missed, but also allows viewers to interact with the stream by playing animations. The viewer can either donate money or spend ‘Channel Points’ (twitch’s free currency which you can accrue by watching streams) to activate these special animations which in effect put them in contact with the streamer. In this instance the streamer, SushiDragon, has automated interaction with his viewers which allows him to focus on what he is doing, while also allowing the viewer to feel like they are effecting the stream in a non harmful way. It is an interesting interaction which essentially mimics human connection via an automated process. While that may be more ‘fun’ for stream, there has been this issue of parasocial relationships on twitch particularly. Does this automation make that situation worse? That could definitely be argued. Automation can be a dangerous tool which takes advantage of people if we are not careful. I highly doubt the intent of this fun interaction was to create addiction for the stream, but it could be compounding the issue. Who knows, it could be entirely harmless. Anyway I hope you can forgive my stream of consciousness, and thank you for reading.