Configurable Joints – Part 2

In the last tutorial, we learned about configurable joints, anchors, XYZ Motion, Angular XYZ Motion, Angular XYZ Limits, Target Rotation and Angular Velocity, as well as, Angular XYZ Drives.

In this lesson, we are going to learn how it works when connected to one or more other configurable joints to start to create a body. The final tutorial will go over configuring a rigged character and making it stand and balance. So let’s get started.

Rename our Cube to Forearm. Press Ctrl+D or right click and click duplicate. Rename this to Upper Arm and drag the green arrow directly up to look below. Leave a little space so we can see the rotations a bit better. If we just press play, the joints act like the aren’t connected and will both swing like how we set up our forearm.

Next we are going to reset the configurable joint to our elbow. Right click the upper arm and click reset. First we want to lock the XY and Z motions as we don’t want it to move laterally. Next we want to look closer at the connected body. If we drag the ForeArm rigidbody to the Upper Arm we get the below. Not what we are going for. In this case it looks like the top of the forearm is connected to the top of the upperarm by an imaginary line. So they rotate around themselves. (for the purpose of this gif, i locked the Y and Z axis on the upperarm).

Keep Reading

Tracking Technostress: A Task Interruption of Data Entry Study

Coauthored with Dr. Randall Minas, University of Hawaii at Manoa and Presented at Human Computer Interaction International 2020

As of writing this, I have yet to conduct the experiment due to COVID-19. I intended to conduct it right after Spring Break, but we never returned. Now I am in the midst of my Dissertation, so will need to balance that and finishing this. Hopefully I can finish this soon. I enjoyed coming up with the experiment and hope it has some lasting impacts for understanding technostress individuals and how interruptions can impact performance.


Abstract. The prevalence of information systems and the resulting increase in continuous notifications have blurred the lines of work and leisure, resulting in increased stress. These changes in the work environment have had detrimental effects on workers ability to sustain attention and remain productive. Despite academic interest in both IT-mediated interruptions and technostress, there has been little research on the juncture of both of these while also utilizing eye tracking. We propose an experimental design on a sampling of undergraduate students in order to study the relationship of IT-mediated interruptions on task performance and the moderating effect of technostress on this relationship. In addition to we will utilize eyetracking (pupillary dilation and gaze duration) to tie the level of
IT-mediated interruptions to cognitive resources in low and high technostress individuals.

Research Model

Link to Paper
Link to Official Site
Link to Presentation (sorry for recording the wrong portion of the screen)

Learning Configurable Joints

Good Day,
I am working on a VR project in Unity and wanted to learn more about Active Ragdoll physics. With this the idea is a character is always able to be affected by gravity and external forces. I found some cool people doing the same (MetalCore999, RedStoneBR and DavidKim). They all use something called configurable joints in unity to achieve this affect. Naturally I wanted to know more, and started looking around. The unity manual has some ok documentation, but not enough to do what we want. Even other pages have some decent additional information, but still not quite what I was looking for. So my purpose is to understand what the different settings do and to capture animations of these changes so I (and perhaps we), can better understand configurable joints as it pertains to active ragdoll.

Getting Started

To get started, we open up a new unity project. I added a plane and extended the scale by setting the values to (10,1,10). I then added a lighter red material to the plane. I added a sphere and added a rigid body and unclicked both use gravity. I kept the mass at 1 and set scale to (.5,.5,.5). This sphere will be our collider to help determine what is happening.

Configurable Joint in Unity empty settings

We then add a cube. I set the scale to (0.5,1,0.5) to better represent an arm. This will be our forearm. In the inspector, add a configurable joint to the cube. It should look like this. There is a lot here and easy to get overwhelmed. So let’s try and understand some more. If we press play game, our cube will fall straight to the ground.

This might be a good time to talk about axes. From the perspective of the cube looking at the camera. The Y axis is up (+) and down (-). The X axis is left (-) and right (+) and the Z axis if forward (+) and back (-). These are important to have a base understanding of. So if we look at our configurable joint, we see X,Y,Z motion and Angular X,Y,Z motion. Since our cube is falling down due to gravity, what happens if we adjust the Y motion from Free to Locked. As you can see below, it stops movement downwards, but if we hit it with a sphere it topples over. This is because it is allowed to rotate (on the Z in this case) and then the X axis gets affected by gravity and its falls down.

Keep Reading

Password Requirement Analysis of 100 Major Internet Sites

This paper is quite a bit old, but was mine and another Cadet’s Senior paper.  I feel like it was pretty adequate, but failed to take the next leap, which was actually come up with suggested standards depending upon information sensitivity.  Interesting enough with the addition of Risk Management Framework in the Department of Defense, Information sensitivity level is one of the key steps to identifying what precautions are necessary.  I still get a kick out of reading the data we gathered at the time, especially like American Express in 2008 required the password to be no more than 8 character, but no less than 6.  It needed one letter and one number, but no spaces or special characters.  It could not be your User ID and it was NOT case sensitive.

Abstract

Many sites have different requirements for the complexity of the password required to login. There is no prescribed industry standard, just site specific recommendations for passwords. This causes specific sites to have inherently weaker passwords than their similar counter-parts. We have created a comparative analysis of one hundred major on-line websites in thirteen sectors that illustrate the disconnect between information sensitivity stored on the site and the minimum password strength used to protect it. Through this comparative analysis, we have created a web application allowing the user to input a password and be able to identify its strength and compare it to the password requirements in the analysis.

Link to Paper

Link to Data

Review: Leader’s Eat Last by Simon Sinek

Leaders Eat LastLeaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The very first vignette enthralled me as a service member. Showcasing the values in the military and applied to a combat scenario with lives on the line. After that it was very enjoyable.

Leaders eat last comes from the Military custom that the Commander eats after all his Soldiers eat. Make sure your people are taken care of and in turn you will be taken care of. Being a leader is earned…continually.

Sinek uses this baseline to then evaluate why some teams thrive and others don’t. He falls back heavily on the four basic chemicals in all humans and ties most interactions to the rise and fall of these chemicals. Why biologically it makes sense to reward teamwork.

I personally enjoyed his comparison about earning the rewards. He said something to the effect of, no one would bat an eye at someone giving a million dollars to Mother Theresa, but a million dollar payout to a CEO…maybe it wasn’t well earned.

Altogether, I enjoyed this book, more so than Start With Why. A couple vignettes overlap between the two. If you are interested in a leadership book with good examples, I would strongly recommend this one.

View all my reviews

Review: Red Rising

Red Rising (Red Rising, #1)Red Rising by Pierce Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A quite enjoyable affair. This book reads like a typical dystopian, young adult novel…and it is, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. I finished this rather quickly and part was due to the ease it was to read it, the other being I wanted to know what happened next. The whole premise is all different types of people are put into castes. Reds are the lowest of the low, the janitors, the miners…the slaves. There are those in the middles like Pinks are brothel types and I think it was Green was the Artists. Above them all are the Golds. They are rich and have rich blood. The highest of the Golds are the Peerless, which requires attending and surviving an unknown academy.

This story follows that of Darrow, a young red that is very agile. Stuff happens and he gets launched into this academy as one of the Golds. Obviously he must keep it secret. Obviously he is at ends with his overall goal versus his current needs. This book takes Darrow up and through the academy. The main action is a Roman Gods inspired faction versus faction war. Deaths are sort of allowed, hunger, thirst are ever present and who rises to be the leader in this situation. Obviously Darrow does, but INTRIGUE, backstabbing, lying, are all there. It makes for a fun ride.

I will read the next one, I anticipate it will be a bit more of the same. I wonder if it will bigger (space battles) or smaller (politics scheming) or both? Either way, this book was a very good read and I had a great time.

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Enterprise Use of Security Information and event Management Software

Abstract

This paper will analyze and justify the utilization of a security information and event management (SIEM) software. SIEM software is software that provides real-time monitoring of events, correlation of audit logs and notification of incidents to appropriate personnel. Large enterprises would benefit greatly from procuring SIEM software as it saves resources while researching potential incidents due to the correlation assembled by the SIEM. Conducting all the actions required to respond to an incident or actively monitor possible intrusions would require several full time employees in large organizations. This can be easily accomplished with the right SIEM software. By procuring a SIEM software, although expensive, it is a worthwhile investment in the defense of an enterprise network and fully justifiable if all duties were done manually. In addition, it meets regulatory compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Risk Management Framework or Health Information Accountability and Portability Act. It also assists in the identification and post-incident event management to implement lessons learned.

Link to Paper

Review: The Collapsing Empire

The Collapsing Empire
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When you like an author and you like a narrator it is usually a no brainer to buy the book (audiobook in this case). This really was no different, with the exception of it ending rather shortly. Scalzi is up there with Gaiman and Stephenson in my authors that I will buy whatever they produce. Wil Wheaton usually teams up to narrate Scalzi’s novels. Wheaton was on point for his narration. Albeit the protagonists start to all blend together, not sure if that is fully attributed to Wheaton or Scalzi’s writing style and protagonist choice. Altogether 4.5 stars for Wheaton.

There is a lot to like about the book. A creation of an entire universe, with an interesting subset of features that come into jeopardy. An entire caste system, a futuristic monarchy/caste system held together by sanctioned monopolies. Strong female casts, although the Lagos female was quite vulgar, and altough came off as acceptable for the setting of the novel, was still jarring for no apparent reason in the modern day. One certain female was killed off rather quickly, and I rather well liked her. Science, intrugue, pirates, smuggling, spaceship exposed to a vacuum…

But back to my main gripe. The novel ended too soon. Sure it had the hero’s journey, mission accomplished. Sure it had a antagonist that is revealed and punished in the end. There just was a lot left ready to be explained. It sort of felt like we got to the second to last crescendo in a skrillex beat before the bass is dropped. The epilogue sort of fixes some stuff, but was rather bland and should have been left out. As you can see this is called the Interdependency 1, so it does seem to be a grab to create a series and continue to cash in. Maybe there was some information about the arch of the series, book 1 – Intro and the start of the collapse, book 2 – the collapse, book 3 – recovery and Earth?!?. I say that last bit because the writing rather strong handedily foretells that the initial collapse that prevented travel back to Earth is likely to show up again later in the series. Time will tell in that regard.

By no means did I not thouroughly enjoy the novel, I just felt it could have been self contained in one. I will pretty much be required to read the second one, which may have been the point in the first place…

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Review: The Wise Man’s Fear

The Wise Man's Fear
The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you read the Name of the Wind, then you need to read the Wise Man’s Fear. If you haven’t read the Name of the Wind, you need to.

I didn’t get to write this review hot off reading the book, but it still left a lasting impression that it took some time before I could even read another fiction novel. If you aren’t familiar, this follows the tale of Kvothe. An almost mystical adventuring mage, as he recounts his life story to the Chronicler, a scribe of note. The novel bounces back and forth from present day, tavern telling Kvothe and the past.

I won’t recount all the tales, or the plot, but we find Kvothe fighting against another magician using blood magic, calling the name of the wind, helping a high powered lord, working with a certain type of mercenary and learning their finger language, helping fight bandits and finding one of the demons that killed his family, falling into the Fae realm, recounting his stories, and learning and fighting to become well trained in the path and earning a right normally not given to outsiders.

As mentioned in my previous book review, the language and writing is magnificent. It falls so easily off the tongue, yet is so pleasant to the ears. While Kvothe has so many crazy abilities, it might not make the journey fun, it some how is. And more so than you realize.

This book was nearly twice the length of the Name of the Wind, and I think I finished it within 4 days. It was voraciously devoured as my craving for the completed stories of Kvothe needed to be fulfilled.

I am anxiously awaiting Rothfuss’ third novel in this series; and hope this gets picked up similar by MTV (Shannara Chronicles), Netflix, AMC (Walking Dead/Into the Badalands) or HBO (Game of Thrones).

View all my reviews

Review: The Name of the Wind

The Name of the Wind
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Name of the Wind is so highly recommended it is a wonder it took me this long to read it. The Name of the Wind follows Kvoth (pronounced Quoth) later in life as he retells the story of his childhood and first years at the university. In this way, it sounds a little lame. However, Kvoth is regarded as highly reputably or even thought of as a myth like something from a fairy tale. This retelling is the simple facts of the matter laid out. For example, Kvoth is known as the Bloodless. This came about because he was whipped in school and didn’t bleed because he took some medicine. But isn’t that name terrifying to a foe? Not everything is revealed to be such a low level scheme. He truly lives up to all his names and is great at so many, but he has humanity. Something many other protagonists lack.

The world weaved is interesting, a medieval swords and mystical and engimatic sorcery. Most are poor. War toils the folks. Bandits roam the roads. The sorcery is explained as Kvoth learns it…quickly and expertly.

If the general plot doesn’t sound interesting, the writing is beautiful. I felt it was a mix of Le Guin, Wizard of Earthsea, and the Lord Foul’s Bane chronicles. An example: “Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.” Read the inside summary as well. I was drawn into both the tale and the beauty of the words and tried to listen and savor it. The audible version was performed admirably.

High recommend if you have the time. 5 of 5 stars, absolutely loved it.

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