Photo of Booth

Draft version of presentation

Title: Computers and Miniaturization

The Big Idea: Exploring miniaturization of computers

Target Member: Children and adolescents with an interest in computers. Exploring the area could take maybe about 15 minutes per play. Technical limitations might involve electricity being needed to power the displays.

Value Proposition: The target is interested in computers and is curious about how they work. They need a visible demonstration of how it might work.

World Design Feature Categories:
Self: The avatar is unchanged. However, the area around them is sculpted in such a way that the avatar appears to be much larger by comparison.
Place: The floor will appear to look like a giant circuit board. The concept is that the avatars exist inside a computer. Chips and other hardware can be seen sticking out of the circuit board.
Purpose: The purpose is to educate by example how computers work.
Fun Things To Do: Select different settings and build your own computer. Give it tasks and see if it works, and how efficient it is at the task. As players succeed, they can attempt more challenging tasks.
Society: The only concern in this culture is a task and helping the computer parts work together to complete the task

World Design Plan: Circuit board, array of chips and parts. Individual displays, "wires" connecting the chips together to a master array

INterface Components: The UI will look very mechanical. The default background for a window might be a monitor overlaid on top of a circuit board. When a chip is selected, a window will pop up where there are several boxes with a chip part in each and a listing of the rough capabilities of the chip as it currently stands. If the user hovers over a part, they will learn about that part.

Out-World Components: A wiki could exist to supplement the virtual world. Every computer is made up of multiple parts, and every single one of those parts have options that will affect how the computer functions. "Spoilers" detailing the tasks and the requirements they hold could be listed

Research: City of Heroes (Enhancement slots), World of Warcraft (Gnomes, world looks bigger).

Experiment Plan & results:
Chips: A Test Run
The avatars will touch chips on a circuit board, of varying size and sophistication. The avatar will be given a selection of numbers and told to pick one. When the user has made their input, the chip will read the input back to them after a time delay dependent upon the power of the chip.
Due to issues with scripting, especially assumed similarities to C++, Actionscript, and other decently-designed coding languages, the experiment could not follow the original plan, which involved performing mathematical operations

If anyone was wondering

Here's the script for the chips. The timer represents the number of seconds it waits before giving a response.

list numberchoices = ["1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "0"];
string msg = "Please select a number.";

key ToucherID;
integer channel_dialog;
integer listen_id;
integer num1;
integer num2;
integer numop;

default{
state_entry() {
channel_dialog = ( -1 * (integer)("0x"+llGetSubString((string)llGetKey(),-5,-1)) );
}

touch_start(integer total_number) {
ToucherID = llDetectedKey(0);
llDialog(ToucherID, msg,numberchoices, channel_dialog);
listen_id = llListen( channel_dialog, "", ToucherID, "");

}

listen(integer channel, string name, key id, string choice) {
if (choice == "-") {
llDialog(ToucherID, msg,numberchoices, channel_dialog);
}
else if (choice == "1") {
num1 = 1;
}
else if (choice == "2") {
num1 = 2;
}
else if (choice == "3") {
num1 = 3;
}
else if (choice == "4") {
num1 = 4;
}
else if (choice == "5") {
num1 = 5;
}
else if (choice == "6") {
num1 = 6;
}
else if (choice == "7") {
num1 = 7;
}
else if (choice == "8") {
num1 = 8;
}
else if (choice == "9") {
num1 = 9;
}
else if (choice == "0") {
num1 = 0;
}
else {
//do something else.
llListenRemove(listen_id);

}
llSetTimerEvent(0.1);

}

timer()
{ //TIME’S UP!
llWhisper(0, "You have selected " + (string) num1 + ". This is a very fast chip! It might have come out last year.");
llSetTimerEvent(0.0); //Stop the timer from being called repeatedly
//do something
llListenRemove(listen_id);
}
}

Experiment Slurl:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/The%20Tech%202/140/208/33

Click it to be taken to my experiment site.