[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, now we're at the Museum of Developer Art,
and I'm standing here with Alex, who
actually curated the pieces we're about to take a look at.
Alex, can you tell me a little bit
about why you chose these pieces for a developer festival?
ALEX: So the two artists who are here,
Ezra Miller and Vincent Jose are both developers themselves
and artists.
And so their work is really about using code
to create beautiful, natural simulations.
Vincent creates fluid dynamics that
are interactive, which is a very hard thing to do.
And Ezra creates data viz--
sorry, data visualizations, that are essentially transforming
into flocking starlings.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And why these pieces at this festival?
ALEX: So I wanted to find artists
that could understand the developer mentality,
and communicate to developers, and show
that by using developer tools, you can still
create really beautiful work.
So that's really the main reason.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Well, we were looking at them earlier,
and that really comes through.
Thank you so much.
ALEX: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: I'm standing here
with [? Vincent ?] in front of his art.
Now, I have a few questions.
It's amazing, and I really need to know more.
But first, can you tell me just a little bit about this piece,
your process making it, what you used,
and what it represents to you?
SPEAKER 1: So this piece is called "Fluid Structure."
It's an exploration of how liquid-like shapes form,
deform, and react under various forces and stimuli.
So I've been fascinated for a long time by fluid dynamics,
because you see it everywhere in nature,
like streams, rivers, smoke, and volcanoes,
and it's all this incredible variety of motion,
very intricate.
And historically, it's been very computationally expensive.
But now, recent progress makes it
possible to do the simulation real-time,
and that makes it very exciting for me
to build interactive pieces using this technology.
Also, to explore all kinds of different--
how it's going to react playing with different forces,
and what happens if we slow the time down, or make
it really fast.
And I think it seems familiar and both mysterious,
because we're used to how things react to physics laws.
So I think one of the challenges for this piece was the scale
and making it interactive for a large number of people.
So it's using five different Kinects,
which is a depth sensor that can tell the main space where
the people are.
And it's computing forces based on where people stand
to push the liquid around.
So that most people who are not always
familiar with sensors and interactive installation
would get it, there's little hints--
you see your silhouette.
And some modes where the water falls on you
is here to get your interaction and how
you influence the result. And, I think,
watching the people tonight, it was a premier for me
as well, too.
I tested it with a few friends, but it's like,
what are people going to do, and how are they going to react?
And a lot of people are already getting into it,
and that's pretty amazing to see that.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK, so one more thing is, the size of this
is massive.
And I don't know what your studio space looks like,
but I presume you did some prototyping that
wasn't this big before.
How did you conceptualize a piece this large?
SPEAKER 1: So I was lucky I could prototype a smaller
slice, and then I used VR and Oculus to--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Really?
SPEAKER 1: --get a feel for the scale of the piece, which
I had done in the past for other art installations
which were also pretty big-scale.
And I'm based in New York, so large spaces
are a rare thing to get.
So VR for me is really useful to get a sense of scale.
And the other thing is that since everything
is running real-time, I have a number of parameters
I can adjust quickly once I see the piece for the first time
on site at scale, which I did tonight.
So I slowed down some things and tweaked
some timings make it better.
So that's the two ways I worked on this scale.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Well, thank you so much for sharing your art with us.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, you're welcome.
Thanks.
It's great to be here and have this opportunity.
And thanks to Alex for curating this medium of developer art.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, now we're looking at the second piece,
and this one is by Ezra.
Ezra, could you tell us a little bit about this?
EZRA: Yeah, so what we have here is
my piece "Data Murmuration," which I built using WebGL,
so it's just running in the browser.
And it's a flocking simulation as well as
a data visualization.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So one of the things that I notice
about the piece is you definitely
have something to say about the really clear data that
shows up every once in a while on this graph,
but then it breaks out all these data points
into this flocking behavior.
What brought you to that artistic choice?
EZRA: So it oscillates between this sort
of formless cloud of birds swarming and then this really
well-defined graph.
I think to me, it's trying to get
at questions about whether humanity can organize itself
as we face a lot of problems as a society.
And I think the difference between this formless, swirling
cloud and that get at that idea.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right, man.
Hey, let's talk a little bit more about the tech,
since we're at the developer conference.
You said this is in the browser?
EZRA: Yeah, so I make websites using WebGL.
This was built with three.js, which is the go-to WebGL
library, and I use it in all of my work, pretty much.
And it's built using shaders, which
are programs that run on a computer's GPU that
let you do computations a lot faster than on the CPU.
And it's basically creating everything procedurally, which
means there's no real image textures being used
or any other real assets.
I think the main asset is the data,
and then everything comes from that.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And I also noticed, in addition
to the flocking, there's this almost waterfall effect.
What is that?
EZRA: Right, I actually added that in recently
before we set up.
I think it just adds a little more dynamism
to the background, cuts through the clouds.
It's a feedback loop process, which
is something I use in all of my work, pretty much.
Yeah, I just thought--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Let's leave it at that mystery.
I like that.
All right, Ezra.
Thank you so much for sharing your work with us today.
EZRA: Thanks, man.
I really appreciate it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Wow.
All right, so I'm here at the VR drive-in,
and I'm standing with [? Sarah, ?]
who actually helped build the experiences that attendees
are going through right now.
Can you tell me a little bit about what
they're experiencing?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, so we're Google Spotlight Stories,
and we are creating content that directors
create their own stories in this medium.
So we have "Pearl" by Patrick Osborne,
which was nominated for an Academy Award
this year for Best Animated short film.
And we have the Gorillaz' newest music video,
which is the first music video for our group.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Now, you worked with the production teams
and the artists in building these experiences, right?
SPEAKER 2: Yes, yes.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: What's that like?
Do they have all sorts of questions?
What's different from a normal production experience?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it's definitely a new medium for most people,
but both took to it very well.
You have to think about creating a film
in 360 space a little bit differently
than you would a normal 2D narrative
film, so you have to make it interesting in all directions,
if you will.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Very cool.
[? Sarah, ?] thanks so much for joining us.
SPEAKER 2: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: This has got to be the largest foosball table I
have ever seen.
Look at this thing!
SPEAKER 3: [INAUDIBLE]!
[LAUGHING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Coming to you live from the world
championships of pair ping pong, here at Google I/O.
I'm just kidding, we're having fun.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
All right, there's probably something I could say,
but honestly, this is just mini golf.
So I'm going to go have some fun.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
What am I doing here?
SPEAKER 4: All right, so it's a 360 video booth that
records high-frame slow motion.
So anything that you do looks cool.
You get to share it right away.
Does that sound good?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah.
SPEAKER 4: So the main rule is, you
don't leave the platform until I catch
the arm so you don't get hurt.
Other than that, you can do anything that you want.
you can jump, move.
Moving quick is cool, standing perfectly still
is cool, either way.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: But don't move slow.
SPEAKER 4: Yeah, because it'll be kind of melodramatic.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So like a jump or something?
SPEAKER 4: Yeah, that'd be good.
You good to go?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah.
All right, I'm just testing it out.
SPEAKER 4: I'll count you down.
3, 2, 1, go.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: I don't really know what's going on,
but I'm going to go with this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I am tuckered out.
[LAUGHING] Thanks for joining me at the block party
here on the first evening of Google I/O.
We saw a lot of really cool stuff,
and I hope you had as much fun as I did.
[MUSIC PLAYING]