Thank you minister. The first item of business is general questions and at the first is this one called, test white. Thank you, per is the Scottish government on what action it is taking ahead of the festive period to support pdegree farms in light of the potential threat of avian flu? Since the commencement of the current avian influenza outbreak, the Scottish government has continued to promote best practice by security measures for keepers designed to protect their poultry premises from highly pathogenic avian influenza. The Scottish Government has robust and tested contingency plans, and where outbreaks have occurred, the Government's response has been immediate. With all but appropriate disease control measures and veterinary investigations applied with the aim of preventing further spread of the virus, owners impacted have received guidance and support, including financial compensation. There have been five outbreaks of avian flu in Aberdeenshire since July, and earlier this month 1,500 birds were killed near Peterhead. It is no wonder that NFU Scotland has described the situation as very worrying and that it remains a serious concern. Will the minister reassure poultry farmers that all safeguards against avian flu will be considered by the Scottish Government ahead of the festive period, including housing orders for commercial stocks? I want to thank Tess White for her interest in this area. It is extremely serious, and the risk to wild birds and to poultry is constantly monitored and assessed by scientific and technical experts and reviewed on a weekly basis, jointly by the chief veterinary officers of the UK. The risk in wild birds remains high, while the risk to poultry is currently low, but biosecurity plays a crucial part in that assessment and is the single most important factor under the controls of bird keepers. Biosecurity will be particularly important as the uncertainty rises. As we enter the winter period, Tess White is absolutely right on that. He has been quite unusual for us to have avian flu in the summer months, so we are entering a period of a return of migratory birds, so that increases the risk. If the risk to poultry from wild birds increases to a certain level, Scottish ministers may consider the introduction of mandatory biosecurity measures through the declaration of an avian influenza prevention zone, and the Scottish Government provides advice on how to maintain good biosecurity standards on its website. 2. Ivan McKee To ask the Scottish Government when it will announce funding for its innovation centres. Cabinet Secretary, Jenny Gilruth Scotland's innovation centre programme forms an important part of Scotland's knowledge exchange and innovation ecosystem by enhancing innovation and entrepreneurship across Scotland's key economic sectors. For phase 2 of the programme, £80 million has been invested by the Scottish Government via the Scottish Funding Council and Enterprise Agencies, which will support the innovation centres until 2024. I am advised by my officials that the SFC has carried out an assessment process to determine future funding. That will ensure the sustainability of the innovation centre programme in the long term and maximise the value that public investment delivers to the research and innovation landscape. I am advised that the SFC updated centres on the outcome of the assessment process on Friday 22 September. Now that the assessment is complete, SFC and other funders will work with the centres on the next steps. 2. Ivan McKee I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. I should indicate that Scotland's innovation centres are a critical part of an economic landscape. As recognised in the Government's innovation strategy, they support economic development in key sectors, where Scotland has a genuine competitive advantage, including precision medicine, aquaculture, industrial biotechnology and sensor technology. I am slightly concerned that, as an education minister, rather than an economy minister, I am answering that question and whether that indicates that the Government regards innovation centres as an academic rather than an industrial asset. What reassurance can the minister give that a coherent economic strategy and the imperative to press home our global advantage in key sectors will inform any decisions made on the future of innovation centres? I thank the cabinet secretary for his question. As he knows Scotland's innovation strategy outlines a critical role that he has alluded to in the further and higher education sectors that they play in promoting innovation. I recognise, additionally, that the funding is provided by the Scottish Funding Councils, which is why the response today comes from me as education secretary. More broadly, our innovation centres build that transformational collaboration between business, university colleges and others to capitalise on Scotland's world reading research. To my mind, that is not a binary education or economy matter because the two are inherently linked. The SFC assessment process looks at alignment with the national strategies and priorities, including the innovation strategy and the national strategy for economic transformation. That is designed to ensure that innovation centres continue to operate, not as either industry or academic assets, as the member has alluded to, but rather truly national assets to maximise impact for Scotland. I am notwithstanding that I am due to meet the SFC shortly and I will ensure that coherence that Mr McKee talks to is at the heart of the decision making process. Murdo Fraser. Last week at the economy committee, Professor Sir Mike Ferguson from Dundee highlighted the issue of innovation in the life sciences sector and expressed his concern that start-ups in that sector are having real difficulties in accessing capital. He said that he could see a role for the Scottish National Investment Bank in providing that capital. Is that something that the cabinet secretary would agree with? Cabinet Secretary. I suspect that a response might be better suited to an economy minister and I will ask the suitable minister to write to the member. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the roll-out of the Scottish education exchange programme initial test and learn project this year. Over the summer, officials have been working with partners across the education sector to develop the test and learn project of the Scottish education exchange programme. The programme is intended to replace some aspects of the Erasmus Plus programme as a hard Brexit supported by Westminster parties continues to rob young people in Scotland of opportunities. The test and learn project will open for applications in October. The minister for further and higher education wrote to the education and children and young people committee yesterday with more detailed information on the programme. Rona Mackay. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. Can the cabinet secretary assure Bishop Briggs academy in my constituency of support to continue their German educational trainee programme, considering the impact of Brexit, the withdrawal of Erasmus and visa challenges for the academic year 2023 to 2024? Additionally, would she be open to meeting with the school staff for further discussion on this? I know that the German educational trainee programme has been a really valuable resource to a number of schools. Languages assistance themselves are a tremendous asset for our schools and we know that they enrich language and cultural learning and they also encourage our young people to widen their cultural horizons. However, as I alluded to, the UK Government's disastrous hard Brexit means that we now have less language assistance in our schools and it is also harder for our school pupils to go on school exchanges with the ending of free movement, for example. The impact of Brexit continues to curtail opportunities for young people in Scotland and across the UK and we know that Scotland benefited hugely from Erasmus Plus, for example, with proportionately more students from Scotland taking part in Erasmus than from any other country in the UK. I very much hope that a long-term solution can be found to allow schools to continue their work with Get in the future and I would be more than happy to visit Bishop Briggs academy in Ms Mackay's constituency to further understand the importance of the Get programme and to make direct representations to the UK education secretary on this matter. Willie Rennie Before the SNP gets too carried away with this, this is £1 million compared with the Welsh programme which is £65 million. Surely this is just a fig leaf to hide the embarrassment of the SNP and their failure to deliver on the replacement of Erasmus. I thank the member for his question and of course we will engage with our Welsh colleagues as I know that the committee has directly on that matter, but I do find it somewhat perplexing that Mr Rennie, whose party now supports a hard Brexit, as I understand it, is advocating for additional funding for a policy that his party does not agree with. I am not convinced necessarily of the intent behind the question here. I think that it is worthwhile pointing out that this investment is coming from the Scottish Government at a time when our young people have been deprived of opportunities through Brexit. I hope that Mr Rennie's party will reconsider their position on Brexit and we can perhaps work together to encourage the UK Government to think again in relation to Erasmus+. Ross Greer To ask the Scottish Government how it ensured that the views and experiences of young people, in particular LGBTQ young people, were reflected in the new draft guidance delivery of relationships, sexual health and parenthood education in Scottish schools. The views and experiences expressed by children and young people through the Young Scot and Scottish Youth Parliament reports on personal and social education have informed the work to develop the revised draft statutory RSHP teaching guidance. The draft guidance was influenced by the work of the LGBTI inclusive education working group, as well as a wider range of other stakeholders. The Scottish Government is currently consulting publicly on the revised draft guidance. That includes specific engagement to gather views of young people on whether the revised teaching guidance meets their learning needs. Officials will take into account this activity in developing the final version of the teaching guidance, which is due to be published in the new year. Ross Greer I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for that answer. I was on the education committee when we received evidence from queer young people in particular who told us that they resulted to watching porn to learn about sex because the education they received in school was so poor and not remotely LGBTQ inclusive. The new draft relationship sexual health and parenthood guidance is a vast improvement on its 2014 predecessor on both LGBTQ inclusion and on key themes such as consent. That is to the credit of young people in groups such as the youth parliament and TIE campaign. LGBTQ young people were key to producing this draft and having their confidence will be key to its successful delivery. So can I ask the cabinet secretary how the Government is maximising opportunities for them to provide final feedback during this consultation phase before it is put into use? Cabinet secretary. I am grateful to the member for his support and the development of the revised guidance. As I mentioned, we are running an engagement project to gather young people's views. The Scottish Youth Parliament and Young Scotland will facilitate face-to-face sessions with representative groups of young people and run a survey to seek their views on the revised guidance. That will run in tandem with the public consultation and will be reflected in the final version of the teaching guidance, which will be published in the new year. LGBT young people are also encouraged to contribute where they can or to engage with representative organisations such as LGBT Youth Scotland, Stomall Scotland or LGBT health and wellbeing to help them contribute to the consultation. I was very pleased to be able to see some of the benefits of the Thai campaigns hard work when I visited Castleton primary school recently. I was delighted to be able to make a presentation to Castleton to mark their achievement on becoming the first school in Scotland to successfully and fully implement LGBT inclusive education. And I enjoyed seeing young people's pride in showing me how their school was an inclusive and supportive environment for all of their pupils. Thank you. Question number five, Rachel Hamilton. To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on whether equivalent measures in Scotland are needed to those introduced in England and Wales by the Equipment Theft Prevention Act 2023 in light of the reports of a recent spate of thefts in the Scottish borders. Cabinet Secretary, Angela Constance. Presiding Officer, the theft of agricultural plant and machinery is a significant concern to rural communities and can have serious consequences for the agricultural sector in terms of cost and confidence. We continue to work with the Scottish partnership against rural crime and others and our efforts to tackle organised crime and the serious harm it causes to our communities. Rachel Hamilton. Whilst Scotland saw a decrease in the cost of rural crime, we cannot stand still. World events have triggered new illicit markets creating more demand for stolen machinery. Thefts of quad bikes, trailers, farm machinery and GPS trackers are hitting our rural communities hard. The Westminster Equipment Theft Bill was welcomed with open arms by victims of this crime. So will the cabinet secretary support my plans to bring forward a similar bill here in Scotland? Presiding Officer, the member is quite correct to say that despite the decrease in the cost of this particular crime to Scotland, that nonetheless that we cannot and must not stand still, I am very excited on the fact that this type of theft has very obvious links to serious and organised crime. I look forward to the member publishing her bill and can I reassure her that in terms of the private member's bill that was recently passed through Westminster that we are indeed looking at that closely, that private member's bill now has royal assent. It will come into force south of the board in six months time and the relevant Secretary of State will be able to introduce regulations and we will indeed be looking very closely at those regulations and to see how that will inform our thinking for Scotland going forward. I ask what the cabinet secretary's response is to the latest set of statistics which show that recorded crime is at one of its lowest levels in 50 years. The continued low levels of crime are due to the efforts across police and justice and community safety partners to deliver safer communities and, of course, is due to our investment in the justice system. With recorded crime remaining at one of the lowest levels since 1974, the latest figures show reductions in crimes such as violence, damage and reckless behaviour. Nonetheless, we continue to focus on crime prevention, reducing re-offending and supporting victims of crime. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the recent summit on tackling violence in schools. Cabinet Secretary, Jenny Gilruth. As I confirmed in the chamber last week, there are multiple strands to the behaviour in school summit in June. I convened the first meeting of the headteacher task force, which focused on issues surrounding school exclusion. On 5 September, I chaired a summit that focused on the recording and monitoring of incidents in schools, an area of concern that was raised during the recent parliamentary debate. The next two events are scheduled for October and November. That approach enables engagement with a wide range of stakeholders so that we can hear and learn from the broadest possible range of interests and experiences. It also allows for the key issues to be explored in depth and for the work to be informed by the evidence from the behaviour in Scottish schools research, which will be published in November. Fulton MacGregor. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response and I appreciate her taking the time yesterday to chat to me about this constituent issue. The cabinet secretary will be aware that an assault took place in a teacher in Coltney's high school this month. Although the school is out with my constituency of Coltbridge and Chrysyn, the victim is a constituent of mine and has asked me to raise her case here in our Parliament. I am told that this was a very serious assault and my constituent is still off-watch just now. I also know that the vast majority of pupils in Scotland are not likely to commit such acts, so I therefore ask what assurances can the Scottish Government give that the recent summit looked carefully at the issue of violence against teachers, as well as pupil on pupil violence, and what further policy implementations can be introduced to prevent others from experiencing the same as my constituent did. I am very sorry to hear about the incident that Mr MacGregor has outlined today, although I cannot comment on the specifics of the case in question. No teacher should suffer verbal or physical abuse in their place of work. The work of the behaviour and relationship summit is concerned with ensuring that our schools are safe and consistent environments for all. That includes staff as well as pupils. The next two events that I outlined in October and November have a particular focus on this, and the November summit will benefit from that research being brought forward in relation to the behaviour in Scottish schools research. The BISA research will give us the accurate national picture on behaviour in Scotland schools, and it is important that we have that granular detail. Press reports are no substitute to that end. We also need to be mindful of the on-going impact of the pandemic on behaviour and relationships in our schools. The BISA research and the wealth of feedback that we are gathering as part of the summit process will give us the evidence base to ensure that the right support is in place in our schools to respond to the concerns that have been raised. 7. Liam McArthur Do you ask the Scottish Government whether it has plans to engage with regional screen Scotland regarding their call for funding for a new screen machine vehicle, in light of concerns that a lack of funding could lead to the end of the service? Yes, I do. I am meeting with regional screen Scotland on 5 October to hear directly about the challenges facing the future of the screen machine. I recognise the valuable role that screen machine plays in bringing cinema to rural communities for whom access to culture is limited. I note that the £176,000 funding provided by Screen Scotland earlier this year, which is allowing Screen Machine Scotland to lease a temporary replacement cinema until April 2024. Liam McArthur Can I thank the cabinet secretary for that response yesterday to the First Minister's told the convener's group of the importance of opening up cultural opportunities to people and communities around Scotland? Over the past 25 years, Screen Machine has done just that in the Highlands and Islands. I declare an interest sitting in the Screen Machine outside Sandy School, one of the North Isles in Orkney, watching George Clooney battling the perfect storm, while an actual storm raged outside is one of those cinematic experiences you do not forget. I welcome the engagement that the cabinet secretary has had, but I encourage him to support the further and the future of this valuable cultural asset to the Highlands and Islands. I thank Liam McArthur for sharing the positive impact of mobile cinema in the communities that he represents in Orkney. I encourage any other colleagues right across the chambers who have similar experiences, I'm sure that there's many of them, if they be so kind as to forward information on that before the meeting that I hold at the beginning of next month. I think that it's very material to the discussions that we're having about the future of that service, which is much valued. I call Alistair Allan. The Screen Machine is a much cherished service, as we've heard, for people who would otherwise have to travel hundreds of miles to get to static cinema. Does the cabinet secretary share my view that this popular and well-used cultural service must be able to access the relevant support to commission a new greener vehicle, which will allow it to visit our rural and island communities? So I'm absolutely clear on the value that Screen Machine brings to the communities that it visits, including the western aisles and the esteamon, which is held by its audiences, as well as its contribution to cutting carbon emissions through reduced audience travel. These are all matters that will be subject to the meetings that I'll be holding early next month. Thank you, and that concludes General Questions. Before we move to First Minister's questions, I invite members to join me in welcoming to the gallery his Excellency, Mr Vikram Doriswami, High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom.


And I'd like to welcome you to a talk titled Media Disruption Led by the Blind, which is by Daniel Sabio. Daniel is originally from Puerto Rico. He's now a new media artist and other things, what you probably will talk about as well, in Berlin. And one of the topics he will be talking about is Infinite Observer, which is the first narrative VR experience designed from the ground up by the blind for the blind. Hi, I'm Sabio, or the glad scientist. And yeah, there's my full long name. And yeah, I want to talk to you about some of my projects. But first I want to try a little experiment with you guys. So I'd like for everyone to close their eyes. And as we all close our eyes, I would like for just 30 seconds to listen. And listen deeply to the room around you. And as you're listening, create an image of the room around you. Create an image of how many people you think are in the room. An image of all the people who may be walking into the room right now, where they're coming from. And just do this. Now you can open your eyes. And as you open your eyes, imagine those 30 seconds as 30 minutes or 30 hours or 30 years. And then imagine this as your status quo perspective of the world. Now imagine the thousands of years spent attending to visual persuasions and how you'd personally interpret everyday computing with this newly gained perspective. Hold on to that for a little bit, because we're going to go on a tangent.  It's basically like three conversations. So permission is granted. Please, you know, if you feel like you need to interrupt, you can do that. So when I was five years old, I told my mom I wanted to make video games. She was like, okay, whatever. I was just super into duck hunt.  You know, it's that time. I said, I want to make video games. So that led me on a crazy path. And I ended up going to Georgia Tech, studying computer science. And then I ended up in Barcelona, met this guy who changed my life, who I literally saw in the hall earlier.  And he was like, yeah, okay. But basically what he taught me was that I could make art with code. And that literally just blew my mind. And I realized that everything around me was code. And that everything around me was, you know, manipulatable. And everything could be an art project or an art, anything, whatever you want to call it.  So I spent about eight years after that. Didn't really even care about video games. And just wanted to make stuff with code, installation, art, VJ, projection mapping, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And then, you know, we're talking about VR though. So then I realized one day, oh yeah, there's this immersive art that I'm making all the time. I'm making this crazy projection mapping stuff. There's all these logistics involved. What if I just make a VR experience and put people into this? Wow. And it hit me so late that it also blew my mind. And then I'm also a musician. So when I got the VR headset, I wondered if there was a way to make music in VR. So I figured that out. And I laughed a lot while I was doing it. And I performed on stage a ton doing this. But that's not really what I'm talking about. As I was doing that, people would come up to me after every show and say, hey, you make music for VR, right? I'm like, no, I make music in VR. But I realized that, hey, I had to learn a new skill set because people are going to continually ask me about this. So I quit my job. I moved to Berlin. There's a bunch of stuff about how to make stuff for sound in XR technology. If you're interested, slides will be up, all that good stuff. And I moved to Berlin. And I took a course with someone who's actually sitting in the audience and learned all these different technologies about producing sound in a spatial audio system. And I had this question of, how does a group audio driven VR experience look? So I created an experience with a group of amazing people where we had four people blindfolded. And they're in the Monome space, which is in Berlin. And it's a 4D sound center. So there's spatial audio. And you can walk up to sounds. And they exist in the space around you. And you can really interact with sound in a different way. And it was a good opportunity to take people into a sound focused and tactile focused VR world. So I did that in that setting. But the issue with that setting is that it lives there. It lives in Monome. And you can't take that space anywhere else. But what happened during that, and lots of gratitude to everybody that I worked with, is that I realized something that I just kept on thinking about what it feels like to be blind and how I could never really fully empathize with that experience. And so I want us to close our eyes again. I want us to just try one more time. But this time, as you close your eyes, I want you to just feel. I want you to feel your fingertips wherever they're laying.  And I want you to see if you can detect vibrations around you and see if you can feel the actual reflections of those vibrations in the room. Now open your eyes. And you can imagine the same things again and again and again that these are minutes, and these are hours, and these are years. But at the end of it all, what we come to is that that's our perspective from our limited experience in this and that we need a deeper perspective. So people often tell me what VR is. People in the VR community try to shove things in different places, say that VR has to be this, VR has to be that. And well, honestly, I'm kind of like F that noise. There's a lot of different things, and we're creating our own paths in this world. So it's not really virtual reality or visual reality, it's virtual reality. So if you think you need a headset necessarily to create a virtual reality experience, maybe we could think about it in a different way. And I came back to this question again and again, and what I realized is that it transformed into what would a VR experience be like for the blind? And can this experience actually challenge visual culture? And that led to the creation of Infinite Observer. So Infinite Observer is a VR experience designed for the blind. And as I started this project, I thought, okay, I'll make a VR experience that's for the blind, but also can be experienced by the sighted as well. And people in the VR community are just sitting there calling me crazy, non-stop. And I'm like, okay. So now we're gonna get to a lot of slides with just text because I actually feel like I want to embody more so a less visual tone for this part. So there's a lot of research to do. As soon as I really seriously decided to pursue this project, I went to, so there was that realization. I went to actually live with a blind couple in the Netherlands, Janne and Tina Visser. And they run a foundation called the Walk-In Foundation and they actually bring people into a dark experience, which we could say is a multi-sensory enhanced version of the glimpse that you guys participated in during this presentation. And so they have this multi-room experience that you go into, there's literally no light. Your eyes try to search for it for the first few minutes and then they literally just get tired of firing the cones and rods or whatever that is. And then you give in and you start to use your other senses and you start to discover all of the powers that you have beyond just sight. And so I spent about five days living with them, just night and day, really learning so much. And what I ended up learning from them was, first of all, these people are incredible. Janne and Tina were both fire walkers, teaching people how to walk on coals. Tina was teaching people ancient songs for years and Janne actually was a hacker. He was building his own ham radios and has built multiple Linux machines and also has his own distillery in his house, which his liquor is really good. And as they shared their experience and their blind experience with me, I also shared with them a ton of VR experiences, which I thought, okay, I'm gonna take the best audio VR experiences, I'm gonna show them to them, they're gonna have a response, they're gonna say, yeah, this is good, yeah, this is bad. Honestly, there's zero UX accessibility for people who are blind and VR at all. There's like nothing to do with voice menus, there's no thought whatsoever. And yeah, it made me pretty sad at first, but I also realized that there's a great opportunity to make a change. And I think that as I was with them, I really got inspired for the narrative of the piece as well. Because of the background and as we were talking, they were saying, well, what if we had this group of underground hackers who are interested in overthrowing the dominant visual culture? And that seemed to resonate a lot. So yeah, there's a little reminder. So that really sparked the story building. And this is a, oh, you can barely see it, cool. That's fine. So this is the basic image that sort of led our guidance in that it's smoky. There's an unknown figure. And you're welcomed into this group of hackers who want to subvert these dominant forces of society and they wanna use vibrational forces to do so. So instead of typical ways, they may use echolocation to navigate. They then use molecular vibration to actually teleport. And then they use by mapping the tectonic shifting because they're actually underground as well. They're able to detect movement above and also detect things which sound can actually disrupt visual vibrations in the visual spectrum. So these were some of the things that we talked about and actually became parts of the game and were able to implement already some of these into the experience. So as I mentioned, echolocation, we also have a frequency matching gun where you're able to hold it up to different materials and match a frequency. And that's able to explode, open up new pathways in this underground world. And really what the narrative is about is kind of telling a meta narrative and how can this actually include a real society of blind hackers potentially through just this experience in this art. So how can we take a site-specific installation, for instance, that takes place at a specific festival or at a specific community event, focus on the blind and have this merging of, okay, at the end of the experience, someone in the narrative is inviting you to join this group and as you leave the experience, maybe you have a text on your phone with a link to a website that now is accessed to this community, these sorts of interactions, and then how is it feasible to create an audio only group community platform that would be easily navigable by the blind? So these are a lot of the things that we're thinking about in this project now. So the technical side of things is pretty interesting. So I teamed up with a audio designer who specifically specializes in spatial audio and he works at Magic Leap and with him we've been building out the audio environment and so we're using Wise, which is a popular spatial audio sound engine for unity and unreal and because of the plugin that they have, it's able to actually detect the real-time game geometries and create realistic reflections of the sound in the space. So as we test this, we're looking very strainlessly at how realistic this sounds for the blind, like is this passing the test? And so far it's been questioned and we're wondering, is technology not there yet? Is this something where we have to continue deeply researching more and more and maybe use some cutting-edge research institutions to reach that point? And yeah, as I mentioned, we're working in unity and originally we were focused on deploying it to headsets but I think that with the small enough market of the headsets that blind users actually have access to, it makes more sense now to look at both PC users as well as mobile users and in using some of the Wise plugins in a game-edge and setting, it's easy to be able to deploy it to both and be flexible in that way. So those are a lot of the different things that we're considering and can an audio version only exist? Can we create custom solutions that can travel, that maybe combine all of these into installation formats as well? These are all different things. If you haven't noticed, this is an in-progress project. And so this is the team, that's Yanni and Tina and that's Kedar and this is Chris who's been guiding a lot of the interaction and creative along with me. And really the goal of this project is to empower the blind and create a heightened appreciation for our senses beyond sight. And through the narrative, hopefully it will instill some clarity around the dominance of visual culture and the ways that all of these tech giants have been using visual culture to greatly manipulate people and it may inspire some new ways to circumvent this. And in a bigger sense, I would love to create a voice for the blind as we develop new technologies. I really do see immersive technologies as being like the next big way that we interact with computers for the next 10 years. And I would love to see this be potentially a wake-up call or along with a slew of other projects be a wake-up call that this needs to be done ahead of time of projects coming out, or sorry, hardware and these cycles coming out. And then yeah, creating a community for interaction between real life blind hackers to be able to discuss anonymously and even maybe practice some of these techniques together that are inspired by the narrative. Yeah, and I do have a video. So I'm gonna show that now. So this is a video of an early prototype. Members usually find us, track us through the echoes, but you, I know, you're wondering why we're all here. So let me break it down for you. We have never had a voice. We're always just an afterthought. And they think we are powerless. And until now, we believe them. But look, that's not a problem. That is our advantage. They've made us invisible, so they'll never see us coming. We'll start with the US by finding their single point of failure. We can break down the greater infrastructure. Look, the US controls the entertainment market. If we are able to infiltrate the system and corrupt it without detection and insert our beacons, we can start to find others like us and accelerate our bigger initiatives across the world. So that was the video. So yeah, I'm happy to open up to questions now. And I actually have a few questions for you guys because I know that probably, just say all of you are smarter than me. So I'm very interested to know if anyone has experience using sound or noise in the context of hacking and what people think of the community extension of the piece. And if there's a research out there that could possibly help this project that I'm not aware of. If you have a question, please walk through the mic. One of the microphones. Number two? Have you given any thought to the fact that currently as far as I understand you need a big installation, right? So you cannot have this experience at home where if you just, you know, if you do, if you're visual, you can just buy the headset and that's it. Have you given any thought into building a audio VR headset? Yeah, so this is something that I was trying to actually talk to Oculus about doing and basically extrapolating like the sensors that they have into using it for head tracking because when you're in like an ambisonic world the main thing that lets you interpret it as a 3D audio is the sensors being able to know when you're turning your head or when you're moving within that space. They kind of just brushed me off and didn't give it much thought. But it is something that I'm considering and also that's kind of why I mentioned looking towards like some AR focused libraries where it has the same spatial audio features and you're actually able to scan a room with your phone and that may just be a more readily accessible to where, okay, someone's wearing headphones and they're able to scan their room with their phone and then get audio cues and also have voice recognition where they could guide their character through the space as well. Which is something all of these people are super familiar with is talking to their phone and having those interactions. Thank you. Okay, microphone number one. So thank you very much for doing this and for the talk. It was really interesting. I have some experience of listening to 3D noise, 5D music. They call it as well, which is easily done with Ableton in a normal headset. And my question to you would be, since I think it's not developed yet, you don't have a final product. If you ever thought of doing something that actually blind people could learn how to listen to reality in a better way, increasing some ways to pay attention to some kind of noise or feedback that would only require a normal headset because closing my eyes once and listening to the sounds of the guy shaving your head like the VR experience of that, it's quite amazing what you can do with normal headsets. Yeah, that's a really interesting idea to have like an educational element in there. Yeah, that's super cool. And I love that you brought up the binaural Barbershop example because I actually showed that to Yanni and Tina and it was one of their favorites. Beyond all the VR and ambisonic stuff, they're like that one. It was crazy. So binaural definitely has its place and even talking with K-dars, like this expert in spatial audio, they've been trying to explain it but there's some psychological phenomenon with the way that binaural works with our brains and it just kind of psychologically fakes us out in a cool way. Yeah, so thank you. And if you never watch the Barbershop for audio experience on YouTube. Again, microphone number one. What kind of equipment have you used for haptics or have you played around with haptics? Yeah, so all that we've used so far is just the basic Oculus Touch controllers. I've applied to a couple of grants with haptics research teams to look into that more. We were going to talk to HardLight and then they went under. What's HardLight? HardLight is like a full suit for haptics which also has its pluses and minuses, especially in an installation setting, like switching over between people that can be pretty crazy. But something that I'm looking into is something more simple.  And then the ultrasound stuff looks super cool. Or do you have experience working with haptics? Yeah, I played around with haptrators. They basically create an illusion on your skin that you feel like something's, like for instance, dragging you through the air. There's a psychologist who's working with visually impaired people called Vincent Hyward. He has a lot of really crazy experiments. Basically, it's like a vibrating motor that it's hard to explain, you have to feel it. But if you hold that thing, it just kind of drags you through the air and you can do a lot of really crazy stuff with it.  Awesome, thank you. Before we switch to microphone number two, there are questions from the internet. Oh cool. Take my angel. Hi actually, some results can't really simulate an entire career with this special patient. What are the consequences? Yeah, definitely. That's why ideally, this is an installation-based experience where you are able to integrate even real life objects as haptics and also scent, possibly taste, which is something that I did explore with the blindfolded experience, and all that I'd love to bring into the installation format. But yeah, a lot of it is technology becoming more accessible, like with the haptics. And the more that those devices become more prevalent, the more that they can kind of enter into the work. Microphone number two. Hey, thanks a lot, a really inspiring project. And I would really love to hear a bit more about the collaboration you have with the three other people. How do you work together? Are you in one place? And can you share a bit more of these experiences? Yeah, definitely. So we had the initial idea, which was kind of in my brain. And then I emptied my brain to Yanni and Tina. And we really started to go crazy on the conceptual side of stuff. And I talked with Kader about it, who had made a VR experience for the blind a few years ago. And then we started developing. He lives in San Francisco. And so we would work over the internet together. And then Chris, I knew from living in Atlanta and pulled him onto the project. And it's kind of been me traveling to all these different places for really intense hackathons. And then us working remotely as we can. The next question again for a microphone number two. Because you asked for research that could help you with your project. You probably know, but just to be sure, there is an existing community of audio games and people who make those. And there's a researcher in Vienna who's called Michael Urbaneck, who does research on them. That might be interesting for you. Cool, yeah, I'll definitely look him up. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? Sigma Angel, do we have new questions from the internet? No questions. Do you have new questions for the audience? I... I just want to actually get us to do this one more time. If you guys are up for it. So this time as we close our eyes, I want us to really take a moment to imagine ourselves having been this way before as we have experienced this before. And I want us to use feeling and listening, and scent and taste. And to try to create an imaginary world around us and to have that feel as real as possible. Thank you so much for your time and all your everything. And enjoy all of this.


Lawmaker's lobbying for the position of the president of the 10th Senate have been urged to keep their intentions until the all-progressive Congress releases the zoning system for presiding officers of the National Assembly. This is the position of Senator representing Niger East, Sani Musa. Briefing Senate correspondents in Abuja, Senator Musa insisted that a party's decision on the matter is sacrosanct in given direction on the emergence of the leadership of the 10th Assembly. The Niger East lawmaker further expressed confidence that a party will zone the number three position in such a way to address the controversial Muslim-Muslim ticket. It will be as it may be. It is pertinent for everyone here to know that I intend to declare my intention when I see the zoning, but for now my intent is to go for the presidency of the Senate. In any case, we want a country where everyone will feel at home and united, and I strongly believe that the zoning policy that the party will come up with will address all the issues, especially the issues that came after the Muslim-Muslim ticket. I'm sure it will be addressed, and once that is done, I believe that we members of the National Assembly will queue in and decide then to make a formal declaration. The interest of North Central, North Central is one of the geopolitical zones that have given the president-elect the votes. If you look at the differences between the votes that we gave to APC and the votes we gave to PDB, we have the largest when you look at the differences. These things have been happening for a very long time. Every time we align with the Governing Party in the North Central estates, so I believe that by the time they do the zoning, we will be able to see what is ours, and when it comes I believe there will be nothing less than the deputy president of the Senate because that is the only fair thing that can be done to the zone.


Hi guys, Mattias Mediola here, storyboard artist and member of the GreasePencil team. You know that GreasePencil was merged recently into Blender 2.8 Alpha, so I want to show you in this quick video the basics of GreasePencil and how it works. But before start, please be aware that GreasePencil is in Alpha version, so you can expect a lot of improvement, a lot of changes in the future. Also be aware that GreasePencil and Eevee require a good graphic card to perform well, to perform nicely, so be aware of that too. And that's it, let's start. As you might know, the old GreasePencil was separated into two different tools, Annotation and the new GreasePencil object. So if you only want to add notes here in the viewport or in other editors in Blender, you should use Annotation. Annotation has only very basic setting to do that. If you want to make complex things like to the animation or storyboarding, you should use the GreasePencil object. You can find Annotation at the bottom of the toolbar. To add new notes, just select the Annotate tool and start to draw freehand. There are also other Annotation tools for make lines, polygons, and for the light notes, use the eraser. The notes are grouped in layers. In the sidebar, you will find an Annotation panel for Manage the note. You can add all the light new note layers, change the color, the thickness, and turn on the visibility. But if you want to hide all of your notes at once, you can go to the overlay pop-up and turn off Annotation. GreasePencil is not anymore all over the place in the Blender interface. It is now a real new object in Blender with its own properties and modes. So let's see how to work with this new object. To start working with GreasePencil, we need first add a new object to work with. To add the object, go to the add menu and you will find GreasePencil there with three options. Blank to add an empty object to a star from scratch, Stroke to add a simple line, and Monkey to add a 2D susan. Stroke and Monkey have also preset layers and modules to make it easier to start working. In option mode GreasePencil behaves like any other object in Blender. You can move, rotate, scale, parent, or do anything that other object in Blender could. There are several places where you can find things related to GreasePencil. The object data where you can find the 2D layer and set object properties, the material panel to create materials for stroke and fields, modifiers with a special modifier for GreasePencil, the effects a totally new concept in Blender to add real-time effects in the viewport. In the top sheet, GreasePencil has its own mode to animate their keyframes, there is also a section in overlay for GreasePencil, and in certain modes, like in draw mode, you can find special brushes in the toolbar and top bar, and in the tool setting. To help artists, Blender will have a special workspace called 2D animation. The workspace reminds to the painting software, the white background help to work with black strokes. You have a toolbar in draw mode that shows a set of preset brushes. On the right side, the object layer and materials are very useful. At the bottom, you have a timeline and a top sheet to work with your 2D animations. Let's do a quick drawing session to know more about brushes, layers, and materials. We are going to start with a blank GreasePencil object and enter in draw mode. By default, the stroke will be placed at object origin, but you can use 3D cursor or image surface if you want. The easiest way to know where you are going to draw in the 3D space is activate the canvas grid in overlays. Unlock your stroke to one of the axes, y, x, oz. In our case, we are going to lock on y and enter in camera view. And to get rid of distracting things, I'll turn off all the overlays. Before start drawing, I'm going to add some new materials. Rename the default materials to black and add the gray one with solid fill color. Materials is not just solid colors, you can also create more complex materials with texture or gradient if you want. To start drawing, select one of the preset brushes, then select the materials you want to use, and start to draw on the viewport. To keep your drawing organized, you can add, delete or modify 2D layers in the object data panel. You can also lock layers, turn on or off visibility, or modify the opacity. The brushes are actually preset settings. You can change the settings in the top bar and in the tool settings for different stroke results. To erase, you can select one of the erasers, soft, hard, or line to delete entire lines. A sculpt mode is very useful to tweak your drawing and improve your lines. You can smooth, change thickness, and move stroke softly with proportional editing on. In edit mode, you can delete vertices, join, split, or subdivide the strokes in a similar way as mesh objects. Fill brush can use to fill a closed strokes area with a solid color. You can use Alt key to create temporary boundary strokes to close an open area and avoid dispersion of your color. Or you can hold Ctrl key to manually draw solid fill areas. You can add modifiers or effects to your grease pencil object, to deform, change color, and many other things in an undistracted way. Last, I want to show you how to work on a very basic animation. We are going to change the character expression, add in some keyframe, and using the dub sheet to adjust the timing. To work in the animation, use the dub sheet and make sure you are using the grease pencil context. Grease pencil will create a keyframe on every frame you draw new strokes. You can start with a blank frame, or you can copy an existing keyframe with Shift key on the dub sheet. For use onion skinning, you have to turn it down on the layer you want to use. And also be sure that you have the onion skinning overlay activated. Move your keyframes to adjust timing. Well, that's all for now. This was just another view of grease pencil. Remember, grease pencil is an alpha version. And stay tuned because we are working on a more detailed and complete tutorial to be published on the Blender Cloud. So, see you there and stay tuned. And thanks for watching. Bye.


The Appalachian Advantage plan is the simpler, better way to get the phone you actually want instead of paying hundreds of dollars upfront.  It's called the Appalachian Advantage and is available at Appalachian Wireless. Tuesday, Cedar held its open house and reception for the future of work in Appalachia Student Fair. Their program focuses on moving the Appalachian region move forward through the means of educating students about innovation and entrepreneurship. President John Justice mentions the region's involvement in the fair. Okay, it's for K through 12, a student can enter a project in one of seven subject categories science, math, English, literature, art, music, technology, multimedia or social studies and they entered in one of their three grade levels, the K through four projects are judged against each other, the fifth through eighth grade and then ninth through 12. The guidelines, they have to meet the guidelines for that particular subject category but every project has to connect to at least one of the seven pillars of the solar blueprint. With over 144 projects from 15 schools, students competed for cash prizes. In each of the three grade levels, there were 21 category awards, 63 distributed overall with first, second and third place winners. Then the next level is our grade level overall. That's where the first place in each of the seven categories are judged against each other in their particular grade level to determine that grade level's first, second and third place project. So we do that for all three grade levels. So that gives us nine more winners and of course as they win, this is a cash awards program so as they continue and they advance, they get more money for each level that they win. So the final round of judging is all 21 judges have to get together and decide the best overall project out of the top three, the top three being the first place K through four, first place five through eight, first place nine through 12. So from that comes our student project of the year award winner. During the fair, Mountain Top spoke with Technology and Multimedia first and second place winners, Brandon Hackney and Isaac Eli about their projects. It is a robot to be used in indoor nurseries and greenhouses and it goes up to rows of plants and uses a distance sensor on the front to notice when it's coming up, approaching a plant and it uses elevator systems to rise up above it and go over top of it and it uses a distance sensor and vision sensor on the bottom to see the color of the plant and how tall it is. So it reports all that data back to the computer to see how rough or a lot of the plant is and how much it's grown and it also uses that data to pour like, nature growth things in there with the attached servo motor. CAD is also known as computer aided design. CAD you use software to model, you can model prototypes and parts that you can use for industrial, again industrial and mechanical devices. I've created parts for my partners project, I've created parts that work together. For mechanical devices, toys that you can put together, different parts that all fit together and you just go into a software and create what you want to create, put it onto a chip and then you use the 3D printer here to 3D print. And lastly, while students were excited to earn awards for their projects, Justice says he hopes students see what's possible for our region. For one thing, I think they see some projects that will let them see what's possible that maybe they didn't think of before, you know, a type of business or a particular problem and how they might can solve that problem, I look at other students work. For more on that and top news, I'm Joel Hordjal.