Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
a color, such as a highly saturated orange, as being “loud.” Environments that are colored with bright, loud
colors will seem to be louder, while cool colors help to tone down the background noise and make a work
space seem quieter.
Color is also afiliated with your sense of taste and lavor. A walk through your local supermarket chain
store will provide you with abundant examples of how color is afiliated with food and utilized to market to
your sense of smell, sight, and taste simultaneously. In work spaces, various smells can be compensated for
by using the complimentary color on the walls. For instance, sweet smells that are afiliated with warm colors
like red and pink can be reduced in pungency by the addition of greens and blues to the environment [11].
Granted, we do not have smell functions in a virtual world environment yet, but we do make many visual
associations with smell, so it is something to consider in your overall palette.
7.4.3 C
olor
, e
nVironmenTal
e
nergy
,
and
p
lanning
for
an
o
Verall
p
aleTTe
Now that you have tried various color combinations on your test rooms (Figure 7.4) and observed the effects,
let's consider how these factors can be used in larger, multipurpose spaces. Color, and the environmental
energy it creates, should be considered in the planning for an overall palette in your virtual design. Suppose
you are designing a multiroom conference center for Second Life or OpenSim. It will have a large lecture
hall, two or three smaller meeting rooms, a main lobby, and some outside breakout areas. The pace of a
conference is probably familiar to you. Early in the morning, people arrive for coffee, sign in, and settle into
whatever room has the meeting they would like to attend. Every hour or so, they change rooms, and then at
midday they all congregate for lunch.
Figure 7.5 displays the loor plan of these rooms, the coffee bar, and the breakout space. Now, imagine
that you are using color to enhance the low and energy of these spaces, silently encouraging people to move
into areas where they will get the most from the conference at any given time. Also note in Figure 7.5 the
color-coded arrows showing major trafic patterns for a day's activity at the conference. There is lots of
circulating at the coffee areas, branching off into the breakout areas and into the meeting rooms. At irst,
many more people will head to the lecture room to hear the keynote speaker than to the meeting rooms, but
later in the morning, they will ill the meeting rooms, leaving the lecture hall half empty. Midday, you see
everyone heading out for a lunch break, and at the end of the day, they all head to the terrace for drinks and
conversation.
As you design this kind of space, think about these questions:
1. How would you encourage rapid movement through the hallways and allow for settling in the meet-
ing rooms and lecture hall?
2. What colors would you choose for the walls in those areas?
3. How would you make the breakout areas stimulating to conversation and mingling?
4. What kind of gradation in tint, tone, and shade would you use for a visual transition from one area
to another?
One way to think of the energy low is to compare the sense of centrifugal (spins outward) versus centrip-
etal energies (spins inward) within the space [11]. You probably want people to get their coffee and spin off
outward toward the meeting rooms and to spin inward once they are inside the meeting rooms and lecture hall.
Warm colors tend to encourage centrifugal energy; cool colors will encourage centripetal energy. Of course,
painting your coffee area spectrum orange, your hallways red, and your meeting rooms deep green and blue
might be overkill, but the warm-to-cool progression is a good place to start. It is the overall palette that is
