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Music for a Desert Drive
I’m visiting Joshua Tree in late December. I delayed buying the flight more than I should, and by that time a flight directly into Palm Springs was expensive. The backup plan was to fly into Los Angeles, but this would lead to an slogging drive across legendary urban sprawl in the middle of holiday season…
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“Billiards, but they’re People”
I just finished nearly a whole month of travel, the last bit of which was in Latvia where I participated in a week-long game jam in a castle. Fellow game dev Charlie Behan made a great mini-documentary of the event. I’ve done a lot of game jams, and with this one, I needed to get…
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Sabbatical Themes
Late 2022, I quit my job at Meta Reality Labs. I’m not looking for any commercial projects until at least 2024. In academia, a year outside your normal work environment is formalized as a “sabbatical”; this my DIY Sabbatical. Gestural Input, 2008-2023 At Meta, I was working on EMG Input for AR since the CTRL…
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Talk @ Roguelike Celebration 2022
This upcoming Sunday, Oct 23, I’m doing a talk at Roguelike Celebration, a conference about the creation, appreciation and analysis of roguelikes; that odd genre of game incorporating procedural generation, permanent consequences (often called permadeath) and maximalist systems. In 2020, I did a short talk on Procedurally Generated Technology Trees. This year, I’m talking about…
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1px VR
I have always had slightly dry eyes. This has made wearing contacts difficult. During the pandemic, I gradually became inexcusably annoyed at having to choose foggy glasses or blurry vision when wearing a mask in public. Independently, it occurred to me in The Year of Isolation that this would be an ideal time for some…
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GPT-2 and Culture Ship Names
Brief Personal Update: I accepted a new job and moved to Manhattan – more on that later. Critically, I signed a lease on an apartment after 3 years of cybernomadism. I intend to live here for a while, but I want it to feel like a spaceship on the move. Thus, it needs a proper…
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Taekwondo does not support Double-Jumping
I started Taekwondo in November 2018. I’ve wanted to try a martial art for years, but it’s been one of those hobbies in the backlog that required a chance encounter to nucleate. I used to do more cardio and cognitive intensive physical activities: gymnastics, figure skating and parkour (amateurishly), but the last few years have…
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Telepresence Immersive Theatre with Mice instead of Voice
This past year at Escape Character has been quiet, but very busy. Me + several collaborators have been iterating on telepresence interactive theatre. We have written and debuted three scenarios and are in the middle of writing our fourth. We’ve put on in-person shows in San Francisco, Toronto and London. We just started remote invite-only…
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Wonderful Projects I Did With Microsoft’s Kinect
RIP the Kinect. Literally changed the direction of my research/career/life/art. Gave it more DEPTH. — Dustin Freeman🚁LAX (@dustinfreeman) October 25, 2017 Microsoft has ceased manufacturing the Kinect. Here’s some projects, art and research, academic and industrial, that I could only have done with the Kinect. The Role of Physical Controllers in Motion Video Gaming, 2011:…
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What I’ve been up to
It’s been a while! Lots of excitement is upcoming and I’m happy to finally share. At the end of April 2016, after a year and a half, I left Occipital and returned to Toronto to focus on personal projects. I had contemplated this move for a while, and the timing just happened to work out.…