An Easter Sunday adventure for my 2 y/of neice and I brought us out here to find this cache. Yesterday we found the one on the other side of the river and had talked about the ruins we
could see in the distance, so this seemed like an obvious outing!
Wellie’d up we hit the trail, although the little monster’s wellies were mostly unnecessary as she insisted on riding atop my shoulders all the way to the GZ. On the way, she observed
that the old manor house – with fences and warning signs all around but a small agricultural shelter within the grounds – “is for pigs, not for people”.
Fix at GZ was a little shaky so it took us a few minutes to find, but we got there in the end. No sign of the World Travel Geocoin or AEC Routemaster travel bugs, but a different bug in
situ. TNLN, SL, and saw what might well have been another ‘cacher dismount his bike as we headed back to the road: good luck, possibly-fellow-cacher! TFTC.
Visited for an afternoon walk with my two-year-old niece. Easy find, and a nice cache in a nice location. Let the little ‘un choose where we signed the log (ultimately opting for one of
the pictures of a lady): never seen a logbook like this one before! TNLN, TFTC.
When I first saw this appear I thought that I’d have the FTF in the bag this morning. After all: nobody would come out last thing on a Tuesday night to start a multicache series, would
they? Hah.
Well, come the morning I saw that I’d been beaten and opted to, instead of tackling the rush hour traffic, come along for a leisurely lunchtime look-see. The first waypoint was easy:
I’m already equipped for wardriving so I just drove my car past the place (I didn’t even have to stop!) and then checked my laptop later – sure enough, only one detected SSID looked
anything like GPS coordinates. The second waypoint slowed me down: for some reason, it took my GPSr a good long time to latch on to the Chirp and get the data I needed. Next up was the
NFC tag, which was an easy find in the third place I looked. And finally, on to the cache itself which the coordinates lead me straight to.
Fantastic to see people doing things a little beyond the norm: things that take a little effort. Thanks for fab little adventure this lunchtime, and for a nice little cache. FP awarded.
One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll get as a startup is this: Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in
your success – or failure. I’ve heard this advice over and over and over at startup events, to…
It’s proved impossible for me to re-create the lenses used as clues in the parts of this series that have been “muggled”, and it seems that the only solution is to dis-assemble and
archive the entire series. The bonus cache (#5) will remain available until March 2016 for anybody who’s solved the puzzle but hasn’t yet found it.
It’s proved impossible for me to re-create the lenses used as clues in the parts of this series that have been “muggled”, and it seems that the only solution is to dis-assemble and
archive the entire series. The bonus cache (#5) will remain available until March 2016 for anybody who’s solved the puzzle but hasn’t yet found it.
It’s proved impossible for me to re-create the lenses used as clues in the parts of this series that have been “muggled”, and it seems that the only solution is to dis-assemble and
archive the entire series. The bonus cache (#5) will remain available until March 2016 for anybody who’s solved the puzzle but hasn’t yet found it.
FTF! Happened to be in the city centre eating my sandwiches and looking at my phone when the alert came in: new cache, less than a kilometre away! Hopped on my bike and bombed it down
to find this wonderfully subtle cache. Tweezers would definitely have helped here, but a safety pin that I happened to be carrying worked pretty well too. Nice cache, hope it lasts!
TFTC.
This is the second in a three-part blog post about telling stories using virtual reality. Read all of the parts
here.
I’m still waiting to get in on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive magic when they’re made
generally-available, later this year. But for the meantime, I’m enjoying quite how hackable VR technologies are. I chucked my Samsung Galaxy S6 edge into an I Am Cardboard DSCVR, paired it with a gaming PC using TrinusVR, used GlovePIE to hook up a Wii remote (playing games with a keyboard or even a gamepad is challenging if your headset doesn’t have a
headstrap, so a one-handed control is needed), and played a game of Gone Home. It’s a cheap and simple way to jump into VR
gaming, especially if – like me – you already own the electronic components: the phone, PC, and Wiimote.
My VR system is more-ghetto than yours.
While the media seems to mostly fixate on the value of VR in “action” gaming – shoot-’em-ups, flight simulators, etc. – I actually think there’s possibly greater value in it more
story-driven genres. I chose Gone Home for my experiment, above, because it’s an adventure that you play at your own pace, where the amount you get out of it as a story depends
on your level of attention to detail, not how quickly you can pull a trigger. Especially on this kind of highly-affordable VR gear, “twitchy” experiences that require rapid head turning
are particularly unsatisfying, not-least because the response time of even the fastest screens is always going to be significantly slower than that of real life. But as a storytelling
medium (especially in an affordable form) it’s got incredible potential.
Nothing quite gives you a feel of the human scale of the Hong Kong protests like being able to look around you, as if you’re stood in the middle of them.
I was really pleased to discover that some content creators are already experimenting with the storytelling potential of immersive VR experiences. An example would be the video
Hong Kong Unrest – a 360° Virtual Reality Documentary, freely-available on YouTube. Standing his camera (presumably a
Jump camera rig, or something similar) amongst the crowds of the 2014 Hong Kong protests, the creator of this documentary gives us a great opportunity to feel as though we’re standing
right there with the protesters. The sense of immersion of being “with” the protesters is, in itself, a storytelling statement that shows the filmmaker’s bias: you’re encouraged to
empathise with the disenfranchised Hong Kong voters, to feel like you’re not only with them in a virtual sense, but emotionally with them in support of their situation. I’m afraid that
watching the click-and-drag version of the video doesn’t do it justice: strap a Cardboard to your head to get the full experience.
Don’t go thinking that I’m not paying attention to the development of the Hololens, too: I am, because it looks amazing. I just don’t know… what it’s for. And, I suspect, neither does
Microsoft.
But aside from the opportunities it presents, Virtual Reality brings huge new challenges for content creators, too. Consider that iconic spaghetti western The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. The opening scene drops us right into one of the artistic themes of the film –
the balance of wide and close-up shots – when it initially shows us a wide open expanse but then quickly fills the frame with the face of Tuco (“The Ugly”), giving us the experience of
feeling suddenly cornered and trapped by this dangerous man. That’s a hugely valuable shot (and a director’s wet dream), but it represents something that we simply don’t have a way of
translating into an immersive VR setting! Aside from the obvious fact that the viewer could simply turn their head and ruin the surprise of the shot, it’s just not possible to fill the
frame with the actor’s face in this kind of way without forcing the focal depth to shift uncomfortably.
Sergio Leone’s masterpiece makes strategic use of alternating close and wide shots (and shots like the opening, which initially feels open but rapidly becomes claustrophobic).
That’s not to say that there exist stories that we can’t tell using virtual reality… just that we’re only just beginning to find out feet with this new medium. When stage directors took
their first steps into filmography in the early years of the 20th century, they originally tried to shoot films “as if” they were theatre (albeit, initially, silent theatre): static
cameras shooting an entire production from a single angle. Later, they discovered ways in which this new medium could provide new ways to tell stories: using title cards to set the
scene, close-ups to show actors’ faces more-clearly, panning shots, and so on.
Similarly: so long as we treat the current generation of VR as something different from the faltering steps we took two and a half decades ago, we’re in frontier territory and feeling
our way in VR, too. Do you remember when smartphone gaming first became a thing and nobody knew how to make proper user interfaces for it? Often your tiny mobile screen would simply try
to emulate classic controllers, with a “d-pad” and “buttons” in the corners of the screen, and it was awful… but nowadays, we better-understand the relationship that people have with
their phones and have adapted accordingly (perhaps the ultimate example of this, in my opinion, is the addictive One More Line, a minimalist game with a single-action “press anywhere” interface).
A few seconds after this photograph was taken, a T-rex came bounding out from the treeline and I literally jumped.
I borrowed an Oculus Rift DK2 from a co-worker’s partner (have I mentioned lately that I have the most awesome co-workers?) to get a little experience with it, and it’s honestly one of
the coolest bits of technology I’ve ever had the priviledge of playing with: the graphics, comfort, and responsiveness blows Cardboard out of the water. One of my first adventures –
Crytek’s tech demo Back to Dinosaur Island – was a visual spectacle even despite my apparently-underpowered
computer (I’d hooked the kit up to Gina, my two-month old 4K-capable media centre/gaming PC: I suspect that Cosmo, my multi-GPU watercooled beast might have fared
better). But I’ll have more to say about that – and the lessons I’ve learned – in the final part of this blog post.
Solved the puzzle yesterday but didn’t get the chance to come hint for this one until this morning, even I took a diversion from dropping my niece off at nursery to come and hunt!
Sapphirites wasn’t kidding: getting to the GZ by the obvious route (from the South) would be easier with wellies right now,
don’t know about coming from the North but I suspect it might be better. Fun cache, nice puzzle, good hiding spot. TFTC.
Found via a diversion from my cycle home this evening. Beaten to the FTF by Go Catch, of course, but that’s something I’m used
to, these days! TFTC: nice to see a new cache this far out of the Oxford ring road.
1st to solve… but I doubt that I can get there, first: probably won’t have time to visit until later this week, maybe even the weekend, unless I can rejigger my travel plans a little
bit. Love the puzzle, though!
I’ve loved many computers in my life, but the HTPC has always had a special place in my heart. It’s the only always-on workhorse computer in our house, it is utterly silent, totally
reliable, sips power, and it’s at the center of our home entertainment, networking, storage, and gaming. This handy box does it all,…
