How to make it daylight all the time...

For the past couple of days I have been working on the Phoenix Viewer for Second Life on the NZVWG and have been slightly annoyed by one aspect of the world. Nighttime darkness. It just so happens that the NZVWG works on a night and day system with fairly equal times of daylight where all colours are bright and easy to see and nighttime which causes strain on my eyes and makes everything about 100 times harder to see, adjust and position due to the pixel darkness.

I have found the answer....

By going into the world setting on the top of the screen, go all the way down the list to Environmental Settings and then from the list of day time choose the one which most suits your light or darkness needs. Hope that helps anybody else out there.

Further Afternoon Update

Quick Update

As mentioned previously, the first and most time consuming part is the creation of the central main open area. The PRS technique has been going well for the past couple of hours with a lot of vertical progress by myself and Campbell creating some very cool tentacles that aim to create a sense of movement using the twist function on simple rectangles and by positioning them into the ground to create a sense of the structure being supported by the feelers and embedded into the ground.

It is also great to see the structure in its surroundings next to the beach, with the octopus form being rather well fitting for its corner beach side plot of land, creating a rather imposing and very movie-like surreal feel.

Campbell in the photos as can be seen has slightly played around with the colour of the "Mouth" opening on the structure side, making a border from prims for the edge but also colouring it slightly darker in accordance to allow the opening to be more evident and pronounced to the viewer upon where to enter the structure.

This tentacle feel has also had the bi-metaphorical meaning of the veins leading away from the heart (main structure) with further additions of information being attached to these winding prims being representative again of that life blood of information being pumped and taken back time after again to the body, a circulatory system of rejuvenating information within the library that is the internet.

Also note: that the front fence still hasnt been removed but will be so in a short amount of time.

Afternoon Update

Well as planned we have continued on with our addition of walls to the outside of the main floor which will go up in a heart/machine sort of look up into the sky opening up into a skylight, with just a onslaught of different squares and triangles moved via the PRS (Position Rotate Stretch) system, which is becoming quite tiresome.

It was bought to my attention by Campbell, that Raymond from our Media tutorials advised him that our building should have something to do with our positioning. Due to our plot of land being rather close to the sea with two edges following the shore line we thought we could introduce a sort of sea theme into it as well. With the structure being currently red (the texture being a fibrous sort of wood that gives it a muscle like quality) and it being very much like a machine, to add to the sea theme we are thinking of adding another symbolic nature of the internet machine/ heart as a squid/octopus sort of feel with the tentacles coming out to grab information and throw it into its bowels inside....or something to that extent to be yet defined. But also by this giving it a very playful sort of vibe, but also dangerous, something that the internet has a corresponding role with.

Photos Above: Growing structure of rectangle/triangle sheets via the PRS method, very intricate and time consuming.

Photos Above and Left: Old main entrance

Another thing we have changed is that originally we were thinking about retaining the previous design structure that we had already creating, however we felt that there wasn't enough coherence between the sort of square shapes and the new more organic structure. Also we wanted to not inclose the structure too much but allow it to naturally sit on the landscape and the general beach scene, with the tentacles from our new octopus additional idea stretching out for a small radius outside the building picking up information through the representation of some to be decided objects and then pulling it towards its interior mouth cavern (ie. the internet being a constant vacuum and sucking force of information from around the world into the centre, where it is accessible to the viewer (and in this case the avatar of users)). In conclusion, we have decided to completely get rid of all ideas from the previous design ideas due to our inability to get video links to prim faces, getting rid of our complete interactive idea which would have been our main aim. Nonetheless, we will definitely aim to incorporate it within the interior and exterior of our new "internet library" building.

Keep you posted.

Continuation of main structure

With our cha

nge of plan, we have started by creating a floating multisided level, created from a mixture of triangles and squares joint together and then coloured. From there the difficult task of creating a multi-faced geometric shape on the outside due to having to in a sense place every square/triangle piece in a 3D puzzle formation, with every shape needing to be:

1) Resized

2) Rotated

3) Positioned

4) Stretched

5) Coloured

6) Textured

This while done delicately and precisely also needs to be done fairly fast due to the large quantity of the pieces needed to create this very elaborate and very large structure. Unlike other groups we have decided not so much to go for a "building" rather an interactive sculpture like structure. We feel that a building in Second Life or a social/animation platform has no use having a roof as there is no weather or leakage, no use for doors (as people wont

come in and steal, pillage and loot), no use for windows (again no wind, although I guess if you are limited for design ideas this would be sufficient) and that all these "cheap" interactive elements can be done in a more creative and interactive way. We are hoping to finish the main building shell today, putting on the exterior machine additions later on today that will contain Scratch movement/script elements that will create almost a living machine, a half heart/machine. On the outside it looks through the colour and texture very much like a muscle, while also evoking a sense of burnished copper for the machine bit. Again we return to the idea of the internet, the worlds largest library providing the information life blood to the world, while also creating a building that is also quite cartoonish, abstract but also on a higher level quite sculptural in style and aesthetic qualities. For now, we will continue on with the outside.

Change of Plans

After some deliberation and problems regarding the interactive design of our building, we have decided to completely change tact and go with a more avante garde design.

The new building will aim to recreate a steam-punk form of an industrial abstract blob that will signify the internet. The internet being the largest library on earth. Inside we are hoping to have a semi translucent wall covering of script and text at all angles signifying the surrounding effect of the internet in providing information and how you are surrounded by it. The room will be surrounded by 9 screens, each for one of our journals, where again we will follow the procedure as explained in previous blogs posts, with each screen and surround decorated and designed in accordance to its thematic journal. At the centre of the room, bathed in skylight, a hanging tri fold will have 3 computer screens, each with Sam's, Campbell's and my face, with web links leading to our blog pages and hopefully some form of connection to our welcome videos.

Keep you posted.

First Proper Day

Today after finishing off our other work for different subjects and exam preparations we decided to set the groundwork and the general design of our library onto the the NZVWG, in the Architecture 3, 29, 88, 22 area. Meeting in the 6th Floor Common room at O'Rorke Accomodation we went through a lot of deliberation and we decided that for our final design solution we wanted a building that would:

1) Show off the absurdity of the internet and modern technology and how completely unreal it is to real life, thus creating a monolithic black object which when inside turns completely invisible, thus showing off the outside views and letting in the light by just simply changing the textures on the inside and outside.

2) We wanted to make our building very interactive, with this being the purpose of the entire task. To do so we rather than creating a "book" orientated library, we have chosen to create almost a podcast library, with different pop up screens and large screens at the entrance that will have videos of both, Sam Peters, Campbell Taylor and myself (as the team constituents) talking and both introducing the visitor to our building. This form of interaction in a modern day of Youtube and media is important in connecting greatly with the visitor, more so than text which aims to create a formal barrier. Video, when done well, connects on a human level, bringing across emotion and information in a easily understandable and relatable way (while also playing on the idea from the Media Lectures in the clip "Paper, Scissors, Rock" where the two office workers play a virtual game of paper scissors rock over computer screens in a display of modern inter office interaction).

3) The incorporation of the journals as an important part of the design task was also important. We had a number of ideas in making extracts from the journal influence our architecture, or just have a large number of books with the name of the journal on it and a hyperlink, however we were not fully satisfied. Instead, with the luxury of a large amount of space on the NZVWG unlike those on Second Life, we are able to have a vastly larger structure due to a greater amount of space while still sticking to the prims limit (roughly) and with a large monolithic structure (however clear inside) we decided to use this emphasis on space in creating almost an interior garden space with these sorts of shrines within, small spaces orientated around each individual journal. The user would come to the space, click on the interactive floor tile, a screen would shoot up with a personalized video from our group, explaining the contents of the journal, giving a iTunes/ eBook like rating of it, shows the influence of the journal in our building and also the influence of the chair/bench that we will provide that will be in the style of the journal thus summing up the area. The videos like those at the entrance will be interactive and relatable due to the influence of human contact via the screen will more than text will ultimately explain the nature of the journal and its influences.

In the afternoon we went to the library and took a general note of our journals, taking a couple of photocopies and also running into a couple of problems. Firstly, the University of Auckland Architectural Library had stopped stocking one of my journals, Journal of Sound and Vibration, making it extremely hard to find as I was told they were the only people who stocked it in New Zealand for which I will have to contact Judy Cockeram to ask what to do in that situation, although the content of the journal seems highly unambiguous.

In the afternoon we started designing the building:

The building on the top left is in the shape of slowly increasing sized boxes, with small boxes with an entrance at the front leading onto the main box at the back, almost imitating a pandoras box style metaphor with the unknown inside. The top right picture shows my Avatar within the actual box with a clear portrayal of the clear qualities of the box from the inside allowing streaming light to enter in and in a absurd way is completely different to the texture and colour of the box outside, giving the person entering the building a complete questioning of the building interior. The bottom right picture again shows the exterior of the building and the temporary L shaped dimensions of it which we will change today.

Starting on the Pheonix Viewer for the first time, although similar to Second Life, it has a lot of different small aspects which I wanted to explore in the creating of objects and the use of Scratch to create moving and interactive objects. Below I experimented in creating a ring with a stone texture that infinitely moved 4 metres up and 4 metres down, demonstrating some of the possibilities in our design. I also created a couple of small and large objects with the stand out being the glowing pink almost spiral just to experiment with the texture functions and get familiarized with the Twist buttons. This I also tried to do when trying to create a drill bit sort of shape, putting the reflection up to high and twisting the shape with a high amount of rotations thus creating a helix. By using Scratch I also added a indefinite rotation script that made the drillbit move in a spiral, thus also enacting a drill bit in its drilling movement.

However the biggest problem of our day has come in the form of not being able to find a simple way of putting links to websites or videos which will be a massive problem in terms of our interactive capabilities. Hopefully this will be sorted out today.

Update

Our group, Campbell, Sam and myself met at the O'Rorke library last Saturday to start planning our library space. Due to addition work for our Design crits and other course hand ins this meeting was quite brief in the afternoon (an hour-ish) and we basically threw around a couple of ideas of whether we wanted to have the library space split up into our groups of three journals or have a large space with this week to kind of think about what we could and whether this could be realistically accomplished.

We did a couple of drawings on that, and during the past week we arranged for us to do individual drawings/sketches of the spaces we envision and we will come together tomorrow and try and collaborate on what we think we should achieve to make it at the highest standard both according to the criteria and aesthetically. These sketches and drawings along with explanations I will attempt to upload tomorrow as I don't have a scanner in order to kick-off this entire design process.

Over and Out.