I had a pretty lonely week in London. People backed out of hanging out or didn’t respond when I asked. Steph was still in Zurich, so I just put all my time into the hackathon at work. They had outside participants come in to use the presence platform. That included Avatars, Dictation, Text to Speech, Anchors, Interaction Toolkit, Eye and Face Tracking, and Room Scanning. I was there because I was one of the main designers for Colocation and Room Scanning. I was surprised to find that my work featured in the public materials along with a photo of me.

https://developer.oculus.com/resources/unity-ssa-hs-app/?locale=en_GB

I also published a stable diffusion animation article. I’m really happy with how the animations turned out:
https://onceuponanalgorithm.org/stable-diffusion-animation-for-characters-with-controlnet/

Steph got back very late on Thursday, and on Friday we watched some Voyager. She was excited to be able to talk to some of the actors from that series, including one of her favorites. She compared the Tom Paris character to me, and herself to Belana Torres. It fits pretty well.

Saturday we headed out early for Oxford. We didn’t have any issues and got there mid-morning. We started with a nice coffee by the canal, then headed to the Ashmolean. The museum was being redone when I was last there, so it looked very different. The exhibits were the same to the ones I was able to see last time for the most part. I got a picture in front of Worchester, and in front of the kebab stand we used to go to and sent those to Robert, who I had studied with in Oxford over the summer.

Steph and I had a nice lunch in a little restaurant/grocer in a small alley. We then walked around the city before heading to Christ Church. We did the tour at Christ Church and relaxed for a bit at the AirBnB before going to a few pubs. We hit three pubs including the White Rabbit, and the Lighthouse.

We watched some Voyager that evening before passing out. The next morning we took it easy and then went to Blenheim Palace. We walked around the palace and gardens, but the main event was the joust. I was hoping for an actual competition, but it was a performance. The costumes and horses were better, as were most of the jousting acts. They weren’t as cheesy as the renfair in California. The stunt riders in California were better.