Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
“Barometric Bubbles,” which illed the air with bubbles in response to the rise and fall of barometric pressure
in his real world environs.
Ben Lindquist and Ann Cudworth created a data visualization art piece called “Tidal Mills.” Their
initial concept was to display a dataset in an “artful” way. Readily available complex datasets are hard to
come by, but they did ind a good one in the tidal predictions for the New York City and Long Island area.
Together, they created kinetic sculptures on a virtual beach that moved in response to the shifting tides.
More information about how “Tidal Mills” was designed and made are available on the Alchemy Sims You
Tube channel (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw1IQ7nTTJs).
Glyph Graves, a prize-winning virtual world artist, has played with physical world/virtual world inter-
relationships in many of his works. For instance, in “Relections within Diversity,” he created a virtual sens-
ing environment that mapped the avatar's spoken language to a colored light in a real-world glass sculpture.
Using real-time data from all manner of natural (river heights/temperatures, the earth's magnetic ield, solar
wind from space, data from Antarctic weather stations) and man-made phenomena (stock market indices),
he creates conceptual art in sound, color, and space that are captivating to the visitor. In Figure 6.22 (middle
section), you can see images from “Forest of Rivers,” “I Thought I Hated Him,” and “Enfolded,” which
interact with the visitor or move and create sound in response to real-time events. Movies of these artworks
can be seen on his You Tube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/GlyphGraves).
In Figure 6.22 (lower section) is a data visualization sim called “Memonic” built by Ann Cudworth and Ben
Lindquist. This environment showed the visitor a countrywide slice of Twitter activity in real time and allowed
the visitor to “call” the tweets (linked to color coded spheres) to his or her location by saying keywords in chat.
Although not shown in pictures, other notable data visualizations have been done by David Burden with
Daden Limited (http://www.daden.co.uk/solutions/datascape/about-datascape/) and by Eric Hackathorn at
Fragile Earth Studios (http://fragileearthstudios.com/).
6.11 CONCLUSION
This chapter has covered a lot of ground and presented a survey on 3D modeling, and 2D graphics that are
the essential elements of a virtual world. The textures, prims and meshes can be used by you in a million
ways, so dive right in! When you get more experience, you can start to relate the things you make in a virtual
world, through the application of scripting and databases, to the outside world, and create a “mixed reality”
experience for the observer.
No matter what modeling program or what paint program you choose, what is most important is that you
come into the project with a clear idea of what your message is and how your team will tackle it, step by step.
By doing that planning, not only will you make it easier to complete the task, but also you will ind it easier
to budget.
REFERENCES
1. Cinderella Castle, Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella_Castle. Accessed December 17, 2012.
2. ProBuilder, company website, http://www.sixbysevenstudio.com/wp-lexible/project/probuilder-for-unity-3d/.
Accessed December 17, 2012.
3. Pixel Lab, Sculpty Paint, company website, http://elout.home.xs4all.nl/sculptpaint/. Accessed December 21, 2012.
4. Kanae Project, company website, http://kanae.net/secondlife/index.html. Accessed December 21, 2012.
5. GIMP—The GNU Image Manipulation Program, organization site, http://www.gimp.org/. Accessed December
22, 2012.
6. Making Transparent Textures—Second Life Video TuTORial, You Tube, http://youtu.be/ekLIgpRHSq4. Accessed
December 23, 2012.
