Documentation:Emerging Media Lab Tools

Emerging Media Lab
About EML
A collaborative space for UBC faculty, students and staff for exploration of emerging technologies and development of innovative tools and solutions. This wiki is for public-facing documentation for our projects and procedures.
Subpages
	Main EML wiki page; Public EML website; EML Resources; EML Onboarding; EML Offboarding; EML Operations; EML Projects;

Canvas

We use Canvas for onboarding student workers each semester. Read more about how we use Canvas.

Harvest

Harvest is only applicable to EML project leads when working on projects in collaboration with another group (e.g. UBC Studios).
Please contact the Lab Coordinator if you need to access Harvest. They will then obtain approval from Saeed and UBC Studios (Andrew is the current point of contact).

GitHub

Microsoft Teams

Slack

Read more about how we use Slack here. (The short version: we shouldn't be using Slack.)

Zoom

Zoom is the secondary audio/video conferencing platform after Teams. Zoom is useful for:
- Meetings that include volunteers or collaborators outside of the core team.
- Community events (e.g. EMBC CoP, Showcase).
To request a UBC Zoom account, follow the instructions listed here, specifically the section for "non-FoM staff and faculty based at UBC-Vancouver".
Setting alternative hosts:
- Only users with a UBC licensed/ registered Zoom account can be added as an alternative host. The system does not allow free accounts to be added as alternative hosts.
- I.e. students with @student.ubc.ca addresses cannot be added, while staff with @mail.ubc.ca email addresses can IF they have registered for a UBC Zoom account.
  - To request a UBC Zoom account, see above.
Important reminder: Beginning August 31st, 2020, UBC will require all new Zoom meetings to have a passcode enabled for increased security. The one-click join link (with the passcode embedded) usually works but you might want to share the meeting ID and passcode just in case.

OneDrive

Trello

UBC Wiki

The UBC Wiki (NOT WIKIPEDIA!) is our Institutional knowledge base, used to host public facing documents and resources (e.g. white papers, technical documentation, user test results, best practices). All EML-related pages should be under the main Emerging Media Lab page on the UBC Wiki.

Unity

Only admin staff should have access to EML's Unity.

Maya

Maya is free for students.

Blender

Blender is open-source and free for all to use.

Photoshop

Everyone should have this as part of our site license to Adobe Creative Cloud. If you don’t have access to Adobe Creative Cloud, let the Lab Supervisor or Lab Coordinator know.

For staff members, a tutorial can be found here.

Solidworks

UBC Engineering students get a student license to use Solidworks (learn more here: https://students.engineering.ubc.ca/new-to-engineering/free-software/). The rest of EML does not.
For interoperability reasons, we should usually stick to tools like Blender and Maya.

Miro

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard platform for ideation and project management.
It is free for faculty and students upon request. Read more here: https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017730473-Education-Plan

TeamShare

Public tools

UBC List (lists.ubc.ca)

Only current admins of a mailing list can make other accounts an admin. Please reach out to Saeed or Catherine if you need admin access.

WordPress

Amazon Web Services

S3 Buckets

These buckets can be used for data storage or for hosting static websites. S3 Buckets in AWS are quite flexible, and a catch-all for storage across other services. We use S3 buckets in connection with Sagemaker, CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and ElasticBeanstalk.

S3 Buckets can also be used to host static websites. Note that for a website that we expect will receive traffic, more resources are required to maintain performance, such as Cloudfront for load balancing, and Route53 for giving the site a URL that isn't randomly generated.

Screen Capture Tools

Video

OBS Studio is great for recording a screen capture as video.

recommended by our PIs
free and open-source;
we used it to record b-roll for Global News during the Orchestra project demo on December 4, 2019;

Download it here: https://obsproject.com

Images

As a rule, you can use whatever tool you prefer. However, for Unity screenshots, see