 in early 2014. She will also share mesh and methodologies for using it across OpenSim, Second Life, and Unity 3D platforms. Welcome, Annabel Fanshawe. Hello everyone. Thank you very much Cam. I'm so glad you all could make it here today. I'd like to show you some interesting ideas and concepts that I discovered while I was writing my new book, Virtual World Design. In some cases, I had actually been using these concepts and did not know their formal names. And in other cases, I found that I could use them to create more emergent design. A delightful discovery in either case. I would like you to think about three questions while I show these concepts to you. How to play with concepts while you design. How to use them as tools to get a better design. How to create emergence in your design with these concepts. I am talking about the emergence of deeply creative designs, meaningful designs, from adding lots of substantive thinking to your design process. Virtual world concepts are everywhere. Let's look at illusion, perception, and the history of virtual worlds for a bit. First, we had conceptual and philosophical ideas. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, reality is described as a shadow of the real and unknowable forms in the universe, perhaps the first mention of a virtual world. Almost 400 years later, Pliny the Elder wrote volumes about illusion and human perception. Immanuel Kant's writing influenced Magritte, the French surrealist painter, whose images examined our definitions of reality. Then we got some 2D technology together. The camera obscura led to the invention of photography. Projected images began with the magic lantern. The Lumiere brothers created a new cinematic reality. Later on, we invented the computer and how to simulate 3D space. In 1974, May's War was created. It was the first instance of avatars, game space maps, and a first person 3D perspective within the game space. In 1978, the first mud multi-user dungeon arrived, known as the Essex Mud. In 1986, Lucas Film Games, Quantum Link, and Fujitsu opened Habitat. That was a significant step towards creating online gaming communities in virtual worlds. In 1993, Doom created the foundation of a gamer subculture. EverQuest and RuneScape were early members of the online world MMORPGs. In the early 2000s, the virtual worlds of Second Life and There combined social connections with user-generated content in a virtual world market. In 2007, Open Simulator arrived and started the creation of a system of virtual world grids. Connect for Xbox 360 has been hacked. The Oculus Rift head-mounted display is shipping. The history of virtual worlds is full of concepts and devices and a rich source of ideas. Your memory is a great tool for visualization. For a few minutes, imagine your favorite childhood space. Perhaps it was the dinosaur exhibit of your local museum or the corridors of your elementary school or your backyard. In your mind's eye, take a walk through that place, remembering the size and shape of each area and the objects, furniture, and architectural elements it contained. When you first perceive the objects in this environment, your brain made comparisons to other kinds of objects, comparisons of scale and shape, color, and outline. You may have been looking at the lighthouse and your brain was comparing it to other lighthouses or tall vertical structures. The objects in that environment have been stored in your memory. You may have seen a tree. Whether you call it a tree or arbre or arbol in your native speaking language, it represents a 3D form in your mind. And that form is part of the universal language of forms we use to create a virtual 3D environment. This collection of forms stored in your memory allows you to time travel to places that may no longer exist. As a designer, you need to allow yourself to be inspired by your encoded memories. Utilize your visual spatial sketch pad, your inner eye, which stores these forms for you and calls them back up when inspiration strikes. Rediscover this resource you have been adding to since you were a child and utilize it as often as possible when you are designing or teaching or just showing your children how to imagine new places. Complexity is made from simple parts. Designing what you want to do and where you want to take 3D modeling is often the most difficult aspect of a project. Every complex form can be broken down into simple geometric solids like cubes, spheres and tori. You just have to look closely and disassemble it in your mind's eye. That kind of exercise will strengthen your visualization muscles. This motorcycle model was made by Tim Wager, also known as Layton Destiny. He models exclusively in Blender, which is a free program. Starting with individual faces and lines, Tim pulled and pushed the faces around to form the hard body shapes. He extrapolated the more organic shapes from linear-based elements called nerbs until he had a perfect replica of his new motorcycle. Color affects your perception. In all cultures of the world, color has emotional overtones, spiritual meaning, psychological impact, physiological influence, and a socio-economic relationship. The most obvious of this is represented by the flags of each nation. Colors chosen for corporate logos, fashion, uniforms, and industrial signage are all fascinating examples of how color serves global marketing. Because blue is a universal color, it is often used in multinational corporate logos, such as IBM, also known as Big Blue. Every designer working must have an awareness of what colors mean in the client's native culture because it helps them communicate ideas with the client and ultimately supports the client's message. On the right side is an example of how color of the walls in a room can affect our perception of interior space. Notice how the red walls in the bottom image seem closer. Here is one place emergent design can start as you play with the psychological aspects of color. Lighting is part of the story. Images of our virtual world are made from a combination of the red, green, and blue diodes on the screen surface. These diodes, interestingly enough, mimic the colored sensing cones inside our eye structure that are sensitive to red, green, and blue frequency. When various amounts of these three colors are mixed, the entire visible spectrum and the interaction of perceived light is displayed for us on the screen surface. As you can see from the middle diagram, color temperature and the color of light changes dramatically during the arc of the day. It is measured by a standard called color temperature. This phenomenon is imitated in the virtual environments of Second Life with windlight and open sim with lightshare. During the midday period, the light has a color temperature of about 15,000 to 27,000 Kelvin and creates a cool color in the bluish range to our eyes. Conversely, sunset lighting produces warm colored light to our eyes but has a lower color temperature number of 2,000 to 3,000 Kelvin. On the right side of the screen, two images from Stanley Kubrick's films, Barry Linden and Eyes Wide Shut, have been recreated to display how color temperature in a virtual scene can be manipulated in a virtual world just as it was for these films in real life. However you structure the arrangement of lights or dial in windlight settings or change the materials on your forms, and no matter how complex the environment or structures or characters, your lighting must illuminate the meaning or purpose of this environment, support the moods, and augment the visual style. Sound as an environmental factor. The IEZA framework created by Sander Ubert and Richard van Toll is a useful structure to analyze and plan sound for virtual environments. They divided all the game virtual space audio into four categories, diagetic or sound coming from within the virtual environment such as your player's footsteps, non-diagetic or sound from a source outside the virtual environment such as a musical score, setting which includes things like surf sounds at an ocean beach and activity for sounds that are related to what's happening. Within these four categories they have defined four kinds of sounds. Zone, the sounds related to your position. Effect, the sounds related to your activity. Effect, the sounds related to mood. And interface, the sounds related to your actions and possible use of the HUD. While there is no specific recipe for creating a soundscape structure of a given virtual environment, this framework can be a valuable tool to help you analyze your audio plan. With IEZA you can see how storytelling soundscape was created in Second Life. The terrain of the Alchemy Particles region was subdivided and developed visually into areas that each defined an age or era in the history of a missing population. Each section of the region had a dominant category of sounds. As you plan your soundscape on the IEZA grid, think about what kind of sound environment you want to develop and how that would be balanced across the framework. For example, would the sound design of a virtual nightclub with live musical acts appear only in the interface zone or can it have some effect qualities? Does a god game environment with your avatar ruling over all creation and destruction represent itself mostly in the effect zone? Think in terms of how you want to balance the soundscape in your environment. One large interface sound effect might be enough to counterweigh a whole collection of zone type effects, or perhaps you would like to balance effect with effect sounds. The choice is up to you. Avatar and your presence in the virtual worlds. Your avatar, no matter what manifestation you choose, human figure, fire-breathing dragon, or enemy doll, is your center of experience. As you log into the simulator, your body is stretched or compressed, tinted or made invisible. Meshes and objects are added to create interesting things like wings and hooves. As you res into existence, many layers are added. First the shell of a shape and clothes are put on, then a gender perhaps not your own in the physical world, and finally the social layer that defines your online presence and availability for social contact. Avatars are the common denominator, the hub of your subjective experience. They are the heuristic framework that allows you to observe relative scale and spatial qualities of the virtual environment. They are representative, they are the representative through which you can participate in communication, and they are your co-creator in the shared story of the game. Be careful about choosing an avatar in cyberspace. A psychological and physical connection to our virtual selves runs deep in our minds. For many people, self-observation of their physical bodies and thinking of their avatar lights up the same areas of their brains during scans. The avatar is your first design in a virtual world. Huds and flow in virtual environments. There is nothing with the potential to be more useful than a well-designed HUD, and there is also nothing that can be more annoying when it is poorly designed. Given the popularity of HUDs, most avatars would probably feel naked if they did not have them on, and yet HUDs can block the view and disconnect the sense of immersion in a virtual environment. I have two questions for you to consider. My first question is, what kind of immersion do you seek for your visitor and how does your HUD design contribute to that? For instance, consider the minimized use of a HUD in games like Peter Jackson's King Kong. For much of this game, the HUD is not visible or much reduced, contributing to the cinematic feel by putting you in the movie within the game. My second question, how can your HUD be designed to contribute to flow? Perhaps you have experienced this sensation yourself, to be totally immersed in the world, focused on the task at hand, not cognizant of time passing, or even of your surroundings. This is the state of flow. Here we find an optimal mental environment for performance, learning, and creative expression. Your job as a HUD designer is threefold, to enhance the desire to take on a virtual challenge by providing HUDs that are beautiful and simple to use. To create a HUD that can be customized to fit the player's needs, including the capacity to turn it off or severely minimize it. And to create a HUD that visually and functionally integrates into the virtual environment so as not to interfere with the player's sensation of immersion. Narrative concepts in virtual worlds. Essentially, there are two ways to tell a story. You can talk about it, diagesis, or you can show it, mimesis. Both of these are going on simultaneously in most of the media produced today. In the center is your subjective experience. You see the visual elements in a virtual world as you observe the architecture, landscape, and cultural design, and the characters of other avatars around you. You hear the narrative backstory when the avatars are role-playing, presenting a story, or even chatting in IM. All of this contributes to your temporal and spatial experiences in a virtual world. Your subjective experience can be divided by the effects of camera position, real-life interruption, your avatar's position in space, the internet connection you have, and other circumstantial things. In a socially-based virtual world, several kinds of narrative happen simultaneously. The personal narrative you are creating may contain someone else's first or third-person narrative, so the collective mix can be deep with meaning. Spatial structure and temporal structure are subjective in virtual environments. They are interpreted through the avatar, and that will influence the progression of the narrative. One primary example of this is called phasing used in World of Warcraft to selectively reveal or phase the content available to a player depending on the quests they have achieved. Collective narrative, when the audience expresses their point of view simultaneously, such as we do here in the local chat box, has begun to change the methodologies of storytelling. Your job as a designer is to support clarity in visual and audible narration. Collaborative space concepts. Breaking your design perception away from the mindset that meeting rooms must look like they're real space counterparts allows you to invent new usage patterns of a virtual space and new ways to communicate and engage. In 2007, Drew Harry from the MIT Media Lab designed a non-literal conference room in Second Life that looked like a football field and gradated in color from orange to green. Participants who agreed with the topic being discussed were to congregate in the green area of the field where it said agree. Those who disagreed were to be found at the orange end where it was marked disagree. Some of the images from Drew's designs are shown on the right. Fundamentally, the level of participation when supported by the environment increases when the environment interacts with the participants. Interactivity, when it is not complex or distracting, engages the attendees, asks them to communicate, and creates memorable experiences. So how do you focus the audience's attention? Direct their camera to collect the appropriate visual narrative and also allow them to connect with their social networks in meaningful, supportive ways. Three words to find the solution. Presence, affordance, and participation. As a designer, you support presence by the creation of high quality visuals and audibles for your speakers and guests. As a designer, you create affordance by designing objects that clearly indicate by their shape and position what their usage or purpose is in the environment. As a designer, you create participation by breaking through the presentation barrier and allowing the audience to interact with the presentation and the virtual space. Design the next generation of meeting places and help the participants focus on the speaker's message while relaying it out on their social channels. Prototyping, the real world in the virtual environment. Let's look at the flow of design ideation. Let's imagine you just finished designing a virtual environment for a new resort in the Bahamas called Octopus Bay. In your mind's eye, you look past the elegant, octagonal paper weights that were printed as promotional items from the 3D model and think about how you spent lots of time discussing eight-sided ideas with the client and your co-designer. Farther back, you remember eight-sided buildings and furnishings that were designed and how they visually supported the idea. And at the very beginning, these ideas were spawned by an interesting eight-sided goblet you created in SketchUp. The client was with you every step of the way, even from their offices in the Bahamas. In fact, they contributed some of the 3D design because they could get into the virtual world and rough out their ideas alongside you and your team. The proposal was a success. And even now, someone is looking at another interesting object and thinking of another project. Remember, a virtual world environment, all of it, is a tool. It is an assembly floor for rapidly making models that embody ideas made visible to people everywhere. It is also a perpetual idea generator that can create content through the process of iteration and modification. Terrain is part of the story. Our terrain defines us. We are mountain people, coastal dwellers, or plains residents. Terrain can provide our physical defense or force us to recognize our physical weakness. And throughout the world, sacred places on our terrain are a source of mythology or spiritual beliefs. Terrain in a virtual environment is 50% of the visitor's visual experience. A flat terrain fills most of the frame when the avatar's camera is in the default follow position. Just changing the landscape from flat into low hills adds more visual interest because it allows for the visitor to discover your space. Each landscape we create in a virtual world can define the story of a voyage. If you utilize that approach in your design, it will have a great influence on your visitor's perception of the environment and the contents you have built for it. For more aesthetic inspiration, to find the mood and personality in a landscape, look to the great landscape paintings throughout history. On the right side are two interesting landscapes, Shambhala, built by James Stallings here in Open Sim, and the Fractal Landscape by Mack Kanashimi, built in Second Life. Virtual Marketplace The three basic reasons why people buy virtual goods are one, to establish and customize individual identity, to communicate with others, and to compete with others. Customization starts with your virtual identity. No player wants to keep the look of a default character. They all want to express their individuality. Virtual goods such as skins for your avatar, clothing, armor, wearable accessories like hair and shoes are usually the first purchases a player will make and something they will continue to update. Communication is a basic human need. Virtual goods can be given as gifts to express love, friendship, and other sentiments. Even gestures are the currency of communication. Competition is also natural to human behavior. Invariably, people will want to compete to gain status and wealth in a virtual world. Virtual goods such as weapons, animations, magic spells, and the tools to make these are always popular. There are extensive online sites where players can buy various items to level up their characters in the games. As a designer, understanding the main forces that drive consumption of virtual goods will allow you to intertwine your virtual content with gameplay and maximize the profit from it. Build It Once. This chart illustrates the Build It Once content flow for design development in Second Life, OpenSim, and Unity 3D. You probably want to choose a 3D modeling software that is platform-agnostic so people can work with the operating system of their preference. This design method structure is focused around a shared content library, full of items with file formats that can be utilized by all the destination platforms. You should look for the common file formats that can be imported and exported from the software your team likes to use. Try to utilize the most common file formats in the DAE format and the Autodesk FBX and 3DS formats, and you will have fewer translation issues. Design for All. In our virtual worlds, we are at the crossroads of humanity. People of all ages and abilities are moving their avatars across your landscapes. It is especially important that you consider all levels of ability when you design a virtual environment and make sure that you have created access, invisibility, audibility, and mobility. A significant portion of the population is red-green colorblind. This can become problematic when you are using color to signal with, so always check your graphics with a color-proof plugin that allows you to see the graphic as a colorblind individual would. Also make sure the fonts and size of lettering is readable and in a good clear contrast. To make the signage even more accessible, you can add in proximity-activated sound clips that read the pertinent information to the visitors. Also, having an audio component to your tour vehicles will support accessibility. Make sure your landscape is accessible, your doorways high enough for cameras, and hallways wide enough for turning around with the camera in tow. Support the mobility of someone who may be using puffs of breath to move their avatar by making sure there are no places they can fall into or get stuck in. When you take a small amount of extra time to check these things, you assure yourself of a happier, more immersed visitor population. In 1996, Bob Kringley wrote, People care about people. We watch version after version of the same seven stories on television simply for that reason. While more than 80% of our brains is devoted to processing visualization, that's because that's how we most directly perceive the world around us. In time, all of this will be mirrored in new computing technologies. Bob Kringley was right. This progression towards visually based computing technologies is occurring universally. We are due for some major changes in our relationship with computing technology. Here are three major factors that will contribute to this new experience. The end of Moore's law, the increased adoption of haptic technology, and the increased customization of products in an interconnected world. In the process of writing this book, several technologies intertwined. The initial concept and project plans were developed for it on a quick light modeling system of SketchUp. Meetings about the design and content were held weekly in open sim and Second Life, and most of the figures that illustrate it were photographed in that virtual world using the client viewer Firestorm. This book would not have been possible a decade ago. A wise designer would plan for the future by learning about the requirements of the new technologies as soon as possible and incorporating them into their design methodology as soon as they can. As a designer in the virtual world, you may end up designing for the holodeck in the not too distant future. Thanks for watching. I'll take some questions now. Okay, if anybody in our audience would like to ask a question, there's your chance. Thanks, everybody. Nice of you to say this. Getting a lot of claps and applause there in the little chat. Yeah, I see. I think I see some people waving phone fingers in the back. What about designing 3D for 3D displays? Let's see. What kind of 3D displays, Neo? To James, Abraham, I do get into actual techniques. Each book, each chapter in the book has a project in it that focuses on what the chapter taught. For instance, in the sound chapter, you make a game that's entirely sound-based. It's all flashing by pretty quickly here. Man, and... Oh, I wish I could speak to that more timidly, but I'm not trained in it. However, I do think that our interface is just going to continue to get closer and closer to our body. Contact lenses... Google Glass is an inch away from our eyes. How much longer before we get contact lenses to have that? How much longer before we actually have implants? Scary as that may seem. I think that's what's going to start to happen. I also think that when that happens, our computing spaces are going to change to become more interspaces, and then how we share those will be a very interesting aspect to it. Perhaps it will be a virtual world we go into, simply share our internal experiences. I'm not sure. It's going to make for some interesting new manners, I think. Somebody else has asked, can we visit your sims? Yes, you will be able to visit my sims soon. And in fact, they're full of stuff from the book. We are about to join up to the hypergrid. We have our own grid. We have our own 16-region grid, and 12 of those regions will be open. Let's scroll back up here to see if I missed anybody. Okay, for our in-world audience here, I'm going to paste the link to your slideshow there. So, if anybody wants to recap that slideshow, that'll be the link. Yes. First tips. You can go to the Taylor Francis site. I believe, and put an order in, pre-order it. Signed copies. I'd be happy to sign any copies. It's going to come out in print first, and then it will go out, come out as an e-book. I was thinking about a virtual book signing party and sort of having a real-life virtual party, a real-life book signing party combined with a virtual book signing party, but I haven't worked out the details. I'll put up the link for you. There are worries that things like Oculus Rift are too immersive. Wearing them removes real-world clues that we depend on, even if only in a peripheral vision and prolonged use is making us ill. What can you tell us about that? Well, Mal, I agree with you. I'm the first one to get dizzy when I have to look at something 3D or I'm waiting for my Oculus Rift to arrive to see if that actually makes me as crazy as anybody says it does. You know, I think this is the kind of stuff we have to work out, and I think that ultimately we won't need to completely blank out unless you want to. I mean, I would think that you would have a capacity to sort of tinge your windshield, so to speak, so that you can block it all out or let part of it through. And for those of you who want to find out information, you can go to my website and there's a whole bunch of stuff about the book there. I'm typing it into local chat. We've still got a few minutes here, so keep those questions coming. I don't have any relevant questions coming in through the U-Stream, so our in-world audience here, you have the floor. A written version of the lecture. I was going to put an audio MP3 up on my slide share. I'm going to sound Jeanine Scarborough ask that question. Sounds like a good idea to me. Good. Because if you could actually see my notes you wouldn't be able to read them. Have you integrated the video and virtual world for entertainment, or do you see any limitations in entertainment viewing from an in-world experience? For example, music concert. Well, I think a lot of that subjective events, depending on what kind of bandwidth people have, what kind of screen they have, and all that stuff. Obviously, if you set yourself up with a big screen and a nice big pipe, your experience is going to be a lot better than somebody trying to do it on a laptop. I think the sound comes across pretty well. The visuals may not always be in sync or look a little sort of second generation, but I think in time that'll all be pretty seamless. In fact, I'm thinking in a matter of time we won't even really be putting it on a screen. I'm not quite sure what we'll be putting it on, but probably not a screen. Someone also said the rift will be a new way to do HUDs. So, how does that work for us? Yes. I know I've seen some of that talk about HUDs and rifts and it's going to have to happen. I think Keystone Bouchard has been working, John Broshoud in real life, developing a HUD to go with his Oculus Rift. He's one of the leaders in using the Oculus Rift with architectural modeling. I think I just saw him put up some stuff about designing a HUD for that and now you have to have it. Okay. James has asked, do you use real measurements or do you design things a little bit bigger so it feels a little more comfortable? There's an old sort of rule of thumb because if it looks right, it is right. But, you know, that's based on many years of experience building real. So, I would say that measuring is always a good idea and if it seems to be a little small, then maybe make it a little bigger. You can play with scale, which is one of the great things about this business is, you know, scale. Scale can be anything you want it to be. So, if you decide to make a psychological statement with scale and make the room small or cramped, you can say something with that. So, it's sort of a choice you have to make about whether you want to use it that way. Okay. David asks, are you doing any legit theater now, as well? It's funny you should ask that. Actually, I can't talk about it, but yes, that might happen in the not so near future. Okay. It takes a while to get a theater performance organized. And Nio says, at the moment, you put on a rift, it has to be on scale unless you adjust your avatar and camera. Uh-huh. Well, yeah. Okay. Okay, nothing to say on that then. Oh, thanks. Okay. If we have any more questions regarding the topic. I do. I am to be to talk around that a little bit. I am very interested in mixed reality. So, I always try to find a way to do one, something like that. Okay. Good. Thank you, David. You're all quite welcome. Thank you for coming. Yes, I think we're just about to finish with the questions now then. Okay, and shall I wrap it up there? Yes, please. Okay. Thank you, Annabel. Thank you for that great presentation. And as a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up in the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. In this room, the next session will be how machinima can be used in the future. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience, and we'll be back shortly with the next session.