DAI627 Virtual Worlds Design - Grant Chen

Photo of Booth

2009-05-19T22:39:00.001-07:00

Draft version of presentation

2009-05-19T22:35:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-19T07:03:00.001-07:00

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:

2009-05-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

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

Click it to be taken to my experiment site.

Chips: A Test Run

2009-04-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

Today we'll be testing the scripting. I'm still having problems figuring out how to get math working properly, though I'm getting closer, but I have created a simulation in which you interact with a prim, which will repeat your input back to you after a time delay depending on how advanced the object is intended to be.

Please go to RezzMe Sandbox 210, 126, 22. If you are there to take photos, mail your photos to demota31@gmail.com

Thanks

Here are the groups:

1# Micah Cash (Picture Taker)
1# Jade Liang
1# Kimberly Radich
1# Zhen Tan

2# Karen Chan (Picture Taker)
2# James Molgaard
2# Jose Ramirez
2# Steve Tse

3# Laura Munoz (Picture Taker)
3# Beth Renneisen
3# I Wuen Wang

4# Ed Evangelista (Picture Taker)
4# Danny Pan
4# Zachery Rose
4# Brandon Wong

5# Joshua Gruetzmacher (Picture Taker)
5# Tara Phettaphong
5# Chris Selig
5# Xiaomin Zhou

6# Alisa Lemberg (Picture Taker)
6# Delonzo Pope
6# Colleen Straw
6# Stephen Zito

Experiment Plan

2009-04-07T09:39:00.001-07:00

Experiment Title
Miniaturization

Scenario
Avatars are tiny and explore a history of microchips and the miniaturization of transistors.

Mechanics
Avatars will walk around and look at different chips. Each chip will have a calculator attached to it. The calculators are usable, and will give a response with speed proportionate to their complexity.

SL Location
No idea

Roles
Calculation tester

Role Assignments
Everyone tests calculations.

Assets Provided
Assets will not be given. Players only show up and interact with the objects set up as displays.

Participant Preparation
Participants will require no preparation. They should understand how to interact with objects, but that is all. A list of calculations they'd like to pull off could be good, though.

Production Plan
Find at least three chips and figure out the difference in their response time, then create something to emulate it.

Week 8

2009-04-01T11:16:00.001-07:00

1. SL Cool Places - Find 3 cool places in SL to profile in your class blog. For each, include an image, the SLURL, and a concise description of WHY this place is interesting/useful to you. Ideally, the 3 places should be cool for different reasons.

The first neat place I found was the Long Beach Carnival and Amusement Park (Long Beach 182, 112, 35). I found it interesting because there's a lot of man-made architecture being duplicated here on this sort of idyllic island.

The second I found was a sort of jungle island. It was at Aeryglow Wildlife 151, 128, 29. It had a lot of trees and the focus was more on nature, though there was a central platform with a ball that let you do a dance if you interacted with it. I just liked the recreation of a natural environment.

The last cool place I found was an arcade at Flotsam Beach 112, 180, 21. There were some replica cabinets of old games around, and the character could play them. If you interacted with them, you were given an URL where you could play the game on the web, though there were a few games where you could take a more hands-on approach within Second Life itself.

2. SL Cool Features - SL abounds in features/capabilities, things to do in the world, to do to your avatar, etc. Develop at least basic competence in 3 and profile in your class blog. For each, include an image, at least one link to How-To information (or explain it yourself concisely), and a concise description of WHY this feature is interesting/useful to you.

One of the things that's a huge draw in Second Life is customizing your own avatars, and a major part of that is just making shirts. I've made this shirt here with help from photoshop, then uploaded it into Second Life for L$10, then selected to use the texture as a shirt. This interests me because when I am able to customize my avatar in a virtual world, I feel a lot more of a connection to them, and there is more investment into having built them up. There's a clothing tutorial over here. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Clothing_Tutorials

Another major part of Second Life is the creation of objects in the world by users. I find this facscinating because it allows people to show off things to friends and expand the boundaries of the world beyond what it might have initially been intended to do. A tutorial on creating basic shapes can be found here. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Prim

The simple shapes and upload of textures eventually gives way to the existence of far more complicated systems and objects for users to interact with. In the case of this object, I played a simple game similar to Rock Paper Scissors, which used Street Fighter II as a theme. Attacks beat throws, Throws beat blocks, and Blocks beat attacks. There were three other special options available, but they can only be used once. Learning to interact with the complex systems of the world is useful, but in this case, it was largely restricted to a very simple menu-driven point and click interface.

I'm still having a little trouble with parts 3 and 4. I was able to make a linked object, but scripting and special effects are giving me problems. Also, I'm having a lot of problems trying to find a way to get Wings 3d to let me export to Second Life. A lot of sites make reference to a zip file at the Wings 3d site, but I can't find any.

Change of Plans

2009-03-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

After last week's talk with the Tech Museum people, I think I'm intrigued by the possibility of trying to show miniaturization in transistors. Right now, I'm thinking of having large versions of chips in there with visible transistors that might start out as polygons, but as I show newer and newer chips, the transistors become small enough to just be represented by textures. I'm not sure how I'll show how much faster these things operate. Maybe create a calculator or something.

Bartle Test

2009-03-09T15:14:00.001-07:00

I took the Bartle Test both as myself and the Second Life avatar, as per the instructions.

In both, I ended up with Explorer as my main drive.

Concepts

2009-03-05T08:22:00.000-08:00

So far, for my project I am considering either a world where the player avatar is huge, or the player avatar is very small.

In the world where the player avatar is huge, it might be a place where there are small houses that maybe come up halfway to the avatar's knees. Or I might go with a full-on kaiju thing in which the ground is largely pavement and there are a bunch of skyscrapers and large corporate-looking buildings.

In a world where the player avatar is small, I might try to model a very simple version of a room or two of a house, and the player avatars would maybe scale to about an inch tall, maybe a bit taller.

I'm open to working with other people if their ideas sound interesting to me, too. Maybe there could be a website or posting with the ideas of everyone who feels they want to work together. I certainly wouldn't mind having some help here too, since these could be tricky to pull off.

There.com

2009-02-24T07:10:00.001-08:00

The first thing I noticed when dealing with There.com is that there was a video tutorial immediately. I think I really prefer this to Second Life, where everything has to be read, since this seems to have a very casual audience, and video examples are always great. Bonus points for including a pause button.

I noticed a lot of large billboards with instructions too. Very good technique, since some people read slow, and pop-up messages sometimes fade out too fast.

I saw some people playing with a ton of dogs. That was kinda neat. They were playing music too, it looked like fun. I don't really see this kind of thing in Second Life, at least, not from what I saw of it.

I decided to check out an area with a big old Coca Cola logo and the red and white was pretty much plastered everywhere, even the arcade. I couldn't actually PLAY the games in the arcade, though. I was a little disasppointed there.

Second Life Exercise 1

2009-02-17T07:19:00.001-08:00

Hisame Rae is a shy junior high student. She likes cute fuzzy animals. She tries to avoid getting too much attention, but she wants to be recognized when she does something good.

On Orientation Island, most of the other avatars largely ignored me while I learned the basics. I was pretty glad since I didn't want anyone to bother me while I was trying to learn how things worked. I decided to make only a few minor changes tot he avatar since I didn't want to spend too much time changing things up.

I went to a place that sold furniture since it was listed as an event, but found that it cost real-life money so I didn't want to mess with that. I also found that for some reason, the furniture shop had slot machines in front of it. That was a little weird. The place was empty, so I left to go to a Game.

The game was a medieval fantasy role-playing game. It was dark and empty of other people, and kinda spooky-looking, but I was kinda impressed that they managed to make it look alright. There were a few issues with water effects, but I think it might have been my laptop.

I'm not sure why, but none of the places I went to had people in it except for Orientation Island. I'm guessing I went during non-peak hours or something. I'm not really sure I care much for Second Life right now, but I'll probably appreciate it as a creation tool when I have to start building structures and objects of my own.

Toontown Socializing

2009-02-03T07:20:00.000-08:00

10. Attempt some collaborative actions such as EZ Chat and teaming up to fight Cogs. Describe the basics of what you did and the results. What were the limitations you experienced?

I tried to team up to fight Cogs. Attempts to communicate were slow and very limited. We entered commands and waited for everyone to finish before the commands were executed. I am not sure what would have happened if someone stalled. I'm also surprised that you can't form a party with people. You just walk into fights talking place and if there aren't four players involved, you just dive in.

This game's really built with kids in mind, and it really shows. It's a world made out of perfectly safe foam padding where nothing could go wrong. I can understand why it's important for the primary audience, but as an older person playing it, it's a little perplexing.

Toontown Goals

2009-02-03T07:13:00.000-08:00

6. Name several ways that you are encouraged to complete tasks and attain goals.

You can get jelly beans which you can spend on more items. You also accumulate more experience with a type of gag the more you use it, and can eventually earn more powerful versions. Just like in real life, everything's about acquiring skills and getting money.

Yes, someone will sell you an entire cupcake for a single jelly bean. If Goofy values the jelly bean as much as I value that cupcake, it's fine by me. Who knows what he does with it. Eats it, I guess. I wish I could eat the cupcake, but it's apparently stale enough to do some serious damage if thrown.

Toontown Questions

2009-02-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

5. How are various tasks and goals communicated to you at the start of the game? How and why does this evolve as you gain more experience?

An NPC directly explains short-term goals to you. As you gain more experience, new parts of the game are explained to you. There are also little boxes and arrows pointing at everything of importance. And I mean everything. They even have a little box above your character just in case you forget your name.

Allow me to introduce myself

2009-01-29T08:43:00.000-08:00

I'm Grant Chen, a Design student at SFSU. I'm taking this Virtual Worlds class in my final semester because I'm interested in digital stuff. I plan to become a game designer after I graduate, digital or tabletop doesn't matter to me.