The Tech Exhibit Construction: Day 1

Hi, folks. My Creative Officer, Ian Tepoot, and myself, are working on a demonstrative exhibit for The Tech Museum of San Jose this week. Our company, Involve, developed The Tech's presence in Second Life. I will be blogging daily about this exhibit.

Exhibit Project Website Link Here

Before we started, Ian and I discussed the project with Nina Simon, curator and in-world wrangler for The Tech. We agreed that Ian and I should go about the project like any other individuals interested in developing an exhibit. We have been analyzing our decisions since then so that we can ensure the exhibit will remain a model that is reasonable for people to follow as an example. The only concession to this that we made was making sure that our project idea was something we all felt was reasonable within the time frame and would be ultimately able to be realized should The Tech be interested in it for a real exhibit.

That said,

Day 1

Ian and I started by examining projects on thetechvirtual.org, and among them that we were interested, we saw the IR Orchestra. I had mentioned that I had been playing around with some simple beat-box type stuff and thinking about how 3-D interfaces can control sounds and music in Second Life.

We decided that the objects would wind up being inherently artsy, as it would be a sculpture, of sorts. Inevitably, for the interaction to be easy and natural, a straightforward analogy would need to arise. This would be something like a solar system, or a constellation, or an atomic structure. During Day 1's conversation with volunteers and visitors, we realized that a solar system would be an appropriate model.

As we interact in a 3-D space, a variety of ways of interaction arise:
- Touch
- Drag
- Menu

And ways to visualize data is also available:
- Location
- Size
- Shape
- Color
- Brightness
- Transparency
- Proximity to other objects

And then there were ways the music / sounds could change:
- Volume
- Speed / frequency
- Pitch
- Mood
- Different instruments

So we had our work cut out for ourselves. We decided to go with orbits that planets would move around, to retain some sense that this could be constructed in the real museum. Floating objects work well in Second Life, but don't achieve an overall goal of designing a real exhibit.

Our time flew, and before we knew it our 2 hours of alloted time was up.

Please feel free to sign up and contribute to this project, or any other. We're meeting daily @ 10am PST - noon PST all this week at "The Tech" sim in Second Life