SkyCity Revisited…
…I like it when a little organised anarchy works, Sky City is a prime example:
...leave a trail of breadcrumbs
I noticed kids building with lego at altitude, and decided to appropriate the idea, and give them a little structure. I created an “underground” link, phrased in the “mouseover challenge” of wanting to get into something bigger. Rather than splashy and overt, I made the link a little buried, so the kids felt like they had discovered something that not everyone knew about.
Following the link, it warps you up to a platform 400m in the sky, barely visible from the ground (depending on your visibility settings, you get a small blot in the sky until you approach it then this amazing expanse materializes before you)
squint into the sun and you might just see it - 100m up, looking up
You land in my “object dock’, a good place to explore materials and check the rules. From this object dock you then look out over a suspended plane (I expand it at night, late, when space is an issue):
a building platform
…the ONLY guidelines – do not break/obscure anyone elses building – work together. We had to add the rules, it was a little ugly before we did, kids scrapping and getting territorial – you get that.
The results have been, well, honestly, startling.
Some kids have been up here for hours, mostly in their own time (evenings and weekends) sculpting buildings, “homes” and play spaces, often tearing down and starting over when they realise that “tidy” building looks better, that inside spaces need to make sense else getting around them is difficult – don’t architects spend years at uni completely failing to learn this lesson?
an elaborate "home"
Some kids use only the provided materials, MOST source new things, incorporate them, re-cycle and re-purpose, displaying imagination and creativity I as a crusty old adult can only pretend to remember having.
I am honestly impressed with the skill and attention to detail some kids have displayed here. Object alignment, scaling, positioning etc are, for the most part, very sophisticated…
inter-connections, transport systems
…they worked together, often without any direction or intervention, building things beside and with others – they devised streets, a transport tube system and other modern metropolis entrapments.
For keen (or “difficult”) kids, I changed one or more of thier stationary vehicles into movers that THEY could control – we have hand gliders, thopters and other flying things that kids have build garages for and loan out for joy flights – amazing really. What interested me more was the almost casual (but strategic) suggestions that took TROLLS and turned them into contributing citizens.
inside a towering game palace
Some buildings work really well as buildings – they have internals that are breathtaking, and ramps, stairs, lifts and so on. As adults we look to make sense of our surroundings – kids are not confined by such a narrow view – all pretty amazing stuff, and more importantly a terrific way for them to practice their building skills (which, sssshhh – don’t tell them, is actually why this exists).
Who says chaos and anarchy can not be positive forces…
Tute with a view…
First a little machinema I made earlier: wonkoTOUR
…so I am enriching the noob zone where cybernauts come to learn to build, and am up to the tricky stuff, and have used a few approaches to counter the fact that some of our cybernauts may still be trapped in the concrete operational stages (ie. physically unable to think in 3D yet)
Scaling Objects in X, Y and Z
… so am looking at making things visually obvious. Stretching in X, Y and Z are simple enough – but punters need to realize that the axes move as the object moves – sometimes X is up, sometimes pointing to the left and so on. Not sure if I have got it right yet, but have noticed our budding builder buddies are beginning to sensitively size things, so maybe there is just enough theory and plenty of exemplar for them to learn from.
Adding a splash of colour
How to describe colour – especially when you have to tell kids to spell it wrong … neways, Activeworlds uses either named colours or html colour codes, so I thought I would demonstrate both, with some colour swatches, link to the help pages on colour models and also to an active html colour mixer, so they can dial up complimentary colours, think that approach is ok, shall see when the punters start using it.
Texturing, an art-form in itself
So to describe how to apply a texture, skin, appearance … we have hundreds of stock textures, very few of them have names that make sense to anyone (even the people who originally created them i would hazard to guess), so I showcase what the same shape looks like wrapped in a bunch of different skins, and link to the texture library – not sure there is a better way – having a full texture gallery would be ludicrous I think, but I think eventually we will catalogue them in our object database – browsing will still be hideous I suspect.
I dislike the fact that it is so difficult for the punter to add their own objects and textures in an Activeworld, without being given edit access to the master path .. one of a few bugbears I have about this environment (soz, am used to the creative freedom of Secondlife), still I guess there is a place for cookie-cutter construction with some individual tweaks – is easier for little kids also I suspect and after all, they are our clientelle.
Over at Non-Eco School, we planted an idea, well a tree really that was a place kids could post questions to a scientist – worked a treat, so borrowed that idea for a Builders Q&A tree:
Q&A on a grand scale
Will be interesting to see what emerges as building issues – I do not do child psychology so have no real idea how successful these things are until I see kids going nuts using the skills.
…all good fun
iProcrastinate 1.01b
…lol
When I should have been busy marking, and other good teachery things, I found the virtual world a great place to just … do … stuff.
Sure, there is plenty to do – the cybernauts are entering the “build” phase of the investigation, so there is a real need for tutorial areas, exemplar builds and the like.
Lego for "Big Kids"
So I began shackling stuff together, to show how it can be done, tried to think through the process I use when building, and how that would translate for a noob.
Market Place and Roman Ruin takes shape
The Cybernauts have been in, the Roman Villa and associated ruins are taking shape, we now have a market square, bath house, grand house, other assorted buildings – some are really getting into the spirit of the challenge, others are puddling away in “Sky City” – bottom line it does not matter where they practice to build, so long as they do. I even FILMED a walkaround for your viewing pleasure retrowalkaround
I got a little narky – wondered if, with a little careful scaling and rotating it would be possible to make a familiar building … 20 minutes later:
Opera in Da House
…a 1/4 scale version of the main concert hall roof structure (I love this place in the real world) – buggered if this does not solve a problem I was wrestling with over on Sci Prime – the roofline of my Observatory will be these familiar sails I think. We shall see.
The Object Catalog is gradually coming together, with a team of patient people popping and screen-grabbing objects for it over on SomaIII, will be seriously hoopy when done:
Object Catalogers
4 people working at a time, huge job (thousands of objects to index), progress being made, all good.
Lego for big kids…
…so our punters are over Lego, in a big way, and are ready for challenges that are more real. I guess I over estimated the connection they wold feel with Lego – how quickly we forget the ages that toys are appropriate to kids.
Cybernauts will eventually be building things to solve problems, in the interim they need a challenge that exercises their builders skills, so I thought of a group building challenge – Retropolis, an ancient Roman Villa complex/compound.
Welcome to Retropolis
I cleared the Lego pile (sorry kids, it was bugging me), extended the bay a little, lay down some cobbles, erected signs issuing the challenge – “Build us small a Roman town”, together. I recorded a video (you can see it playing on 3 screens as part of the welcome facade) explaining what was necessary, pointing out what was where and what they had to do. I think it makes sense – what do you think?
I then set about assembling a collection of Roman ruin bits and pieces – scaled so they fit together nicely, accessories and so on, and lay out an object yard – this saves them time searching for period-correct things.
enter the object yard (don't tell them this is the same as Lego)
It occurred to me that I was assuming they had some idea of what a Roman Villa complex might look like, and i have found assumptions to be problematic at best, so decided to provide some inspiration – thank you Google I found plenty of villa-inspired plans and diagrams, of which I constructed billboards to display them.
It will be interesting to see how it develops – scale and scope are something primary kids seem to struggle with – they go large before thinking about practicalities or human-scale. They think large will impress when actually detail and control are more admirable. They see super structure and do not think through the practicailties of gravity, weather, basic physics, terrain etc – this is both wonderful and an issue when trying to construct something that looks convincing.
accessories galore, Persian carpet sale?
…the challenge is issued, with the proviso that untidy/un-Roman building will be demolished. How will they go? I honestly have no idea, but see nothing but potential (particularly in the light of the success of SkyCity). We shall see…
Showcase…
So I have begun dividing up the bunker space, and decided we needed display cases for the two current exhibits (sorry, i see the bunker as more of a museum, with other venues handling most of the hands-on activities.
Having already made a “bright spark”, it seemed natural to use as a symbol of the energy sources wing, so built a box, places some letters, and a couple of layers of spark – made one a lightsource, flickering like sparks of white, faced it with glass and …
Energy Showcase
…we have an energy showcase. It has some depth, so we can put other things in there also, is backed so it is separate from the display space behind and I think it looks pretty zappy.
I am also using my “rustbot” avatar lately – I like the dis-embodied old but still functional look of that avatar, although my analyst would probably have something to say on that front.
Next to the “water and waste” showcase – a rubbish bin – pink to make it kitsch, a fountain animated texture at the back of the showcase to look like running water – a tap (one I made earlier) and I thought a drip also would look cool:
Water-Waste Showcase
…so I fired up Wings3D, started with a cylinder, squashed it flat, pulled one edge facet sharp, bluntened the opposite facets slightly, rounded it off, coloured it blue, reduced it’s opacity to 50% and I now have a drip. I animate the drip using a cyclic animation – it leaves the tap, drops through the floor, jumps back to the tap and repeats – looks pretty neat actually. Glass front and we are done, except for a soft, throbbing blue glow of backlight.
Once I was happy, I began showing them off to slow members of the family who did not run away fast enough – she who must be obeyed asked … “how do you get into the lower gallery behind the showcase?” … bugger me, forgot doors.
I sluiced everything away from the existing up staircase, faced the now exposed edges neatly and presto, problem solved – both upper and lower galleries can now be accessed – let the subdivision begin
Walking around this facility, I wonder if Architects have this much fun – imaging a space then making it?
