Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Scripted objects used for these primary needs are the benches and seats in the viewing areas, various
interactive signs and boxes to give the visitor informative note cards from the exhibits, and transportation
devices (often teleporters, sometimes tour vehicles) that help the avatar move about, especially in a large
virtual environment.
Now, what about secondary needs? To deine them, consider these questions:
1. What if some of your artworks were interacting with real-time data gathered online?
2. What if your artworks “interacted” with the visitor, creating sound, movement, or other changes in
response to their presence?
These secondary needs can directly affect the visitors' experience with the artworks in your Art Park
and greatly enhance their understanding of your message. So, how do you decide what gets scripted in your
Art Park? The essential questions to ask are the following:
1. What experience can be created for the visitor by using scripts?
2. How can scripted objects enhance that experience?
3. How can this environment be made more accessible to all through scripting?
Remember to consider “Design for All” access in your planning, with signs that can talk as well as be
read, paths that guide with sound as well as directional pointers, and tour vehicles that give narration in
sound and notes.
14.2.2 B uilding a r eaCTiVe e nVironmenT
In a virtual world, architecture can take on a life of its own. Jon Brouchoud (Keystone Bouchard in Second
Life) creates spaces with “relexive architecture” and interactive forms. These structures react to an avatar's
presence by changing properties, such as their scale, form, opacity, and color. If you are thinking about design-
ing a building that has the capacity to move, change, and evolve its shape, you cannot help but develop an
awareness of how the scripts inside the building elements will be working and how they relate to the linked
structure of the building itself. In Figure 14.1, a “twist response” script developed by Keystone has been loaded
into some brick columns, and, as you can see, the proximity of an avatar causes the columns to twist up.
As a designer, you also need to think of the interaction between an avatar and the virtual environment,
not only the “reaction” of the objects to the avatar's presence, but the “interactivity” that a scripted design
engenders. The plasticity of a virtual environment creates both design opportunities and complications for
you in this regard. On the one hand, you could design a living room that rearranges its furniture to suit the
owner's needs for space, but on the other hand, you may ind an automatic furniture-arranging living room
does not fully suit the very human need to be “hands on” when personalizing an owner's environment. Haptic
technology is creating ways to let us touch and feel virtual objects but is still in its early development stages.
For the time being, we still rely on screen-based graphic and textual interfaces to control and manipulate the
objects and their properties in our designs. Make the following observations as you learn about scripting and
plan for its inclusion in your virtual environment designs.
1. What interactive opportunities am I seeing in this virtual environment?
2. What are avatars doing with this designed environment that I did not expect?
3. Have I seen avatars playing games with available content not intended for gaming purposes or
hacking/modifying it in some way?
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