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13
Prototyping the Real World
in a Virtual Environment
It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can’t nd
anywhere else in the world.
—Walt Disney speaking about EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)
13.1 PROTOTYPING AND WORKFLOW: WHEREANDHOW
DO VIRTUAL WORLDS FIT IN?
How do you get from inspiration to a real life prototype? Let’s look at the ow of design ideation. As you
can see in Figure13.1, each step of a design process ows into the next, and concepts from some steps may
possibly ow into noncontiguous steps as well. Design thinking is not usually a linear process; it is more like
a “cloud” of ideas. In every step but the initial one, there is an opportunity for prototyping something as well
as developing a new layer on the previous prototype.
As you can see in Figure 13.2, your initial design concept may be inspired by an interesting eight-sided
goblet you found at a ea market. The octagon shape informs your design approach on every level. With
the pleasing symmetry of this regular polygon, rooms feel circular but are easier to build and furnish.
Interconnections between other rooms, buildings, and regions become simplied and organized due to the
array of sides on this regular polygon.
Where do virtual worlds t in this design cycle? Well, if you think about it, they t in everywhere. All these
design phases lend themselves to virtual world utilization. For instance, the development of an octagonal grid,
created for a oor or for a city plaza, can easily be realized in any virtual world through the use of textures
with an octagonal pattern on them or with octagonal geometry. In fact, the octagonal pattern can even be
used on the land textures to visually embed the theme, and the terrain itself can be terraformed to octagonal
patterns, perhaps resembling columnar basalt or stepped terrain. As far as building structures and furniture
is concerned, you might nd it interesting “that numerous Americans, from Thomas Jefferson to Orson
Fowler, saw octagon architecture as a tool to cultivate new kinds of private ‘selves’—stronger, healthier, more
rational subjectivities capable of negotiating an emergent capitalist and democratic society” [1].
How would you convey this octagonal concept to your client, your peers, or your class? It helps to “reverse
engineer” the workow in your mind. Start from the date of the nal presentation and who will be seeing
the proposal. What are their needs, and how do they relate to the overall message? What methodologies
will you adopt to answer their needs and develop the presentation of that message? Let’s suppose your client
wanted to launch a new resort and golf course called Octopus Bay in the Bahamas. Think backwards from
the future goals to plan your project. In your mind’s eye you look past the elegant octagonal paperweights
that were printed as promotional items from the 3D model and think of how you spent lots of time discussing
eight-sided ideas with your client and codesigners. Further back, you remember eight-sided buildings and
furnishings that were designed and how they subtly supported the concept of eight-sided symmetry displayed
258 Virtual World Design
by an octopus. All of these buildings were nested in a series of interconnected octagonal cul-de-sacs that
spanned the octagonal network of your virtual designs. The clients were with you every step of the way, even
from their ofces in the Bahamas. In fact, they contributed some of the 3D design because they could get into
the virtual world and rough out their ideas alongside you and your team.
The proposal was a success, and even now someone is looking at that goblet and thinking of another
project (Figure13.2). Remember, a virtual world environment, all of it, is a tool. It is an assembly oor for
rapidly making models that embody ideas made visible to people everywhere. It is also a perpetual idea
generator that can create its own internal source of content through the process of iteration and modication.
13.2 INTRODUCTION TO WORLDWIDE GROUP COLLABORATION
AND WHY YOU SHOULD USE IT
On June 4, 2009, President Barack Obama spoke in Cairo and called for creating a new relationship between
the United States and Islam [2]. Part of that initiative developed into a program called the Online Youth
Network: Kansas to Cairo, which encouraged the development of existing online programs for inter national
communications between young Americans and Muslims. One of the notable projects in this program
involved David Denton, AIA, from the United States, and Amr Attia, owner of the PUD (Planning and Urban
Development) architectural rm in Cairo. Denton and Attia had previously collaborated internationally on
Real World
Prototype
Core Idea
Virtual World
Prototype
Initial
Catalyst
Idea
Process of "definition"
3D concepts:
Shape
Form
2D concepts:
Pattern
Line work
FIGURE 13.1 Schematic showing the cloud of design ideation, initiated from the ideas discovered with Research and
Observation, catalyzed into and dened as a Core Idea that expands into 2D and 3D concepts and Prototypes for the
real and virtual world.
259Prototyping the Real World in a Virtual Environment
Development Path
D
evelo
p
ment
Design Concept Follow rough - Octopus Bay
Design Idea Catalyst (2D octagonal patterns & 3D structure)
Initial
Development
Conceptual
Development
Environmental
Development
Further
Structural
Development
FIGURE 13.2 Schematic showing a design concept ow through the design and construction of a virtual resort called
Octopus Bay. The development path starts with an eight-sided goblet (bottom center) which in turn generates develop-
ment of structures, landforms, and buildings (left side). It all comes together in the virtual world (three images on
rightside), and shown here are screen grabs from OpenSim including a top view, central lawn view, and long shot of the
completed proposal build.
260 Virtual World Design
projects by utilizing Second Life’s building tools to create virtual concept models of the architecture they
were designing. Together, they created concept models that were eventually measured in detail, translated
into construction drawings, and built on the real site. With the U.S. Department of State’s support, Denton and
Attia brought together two groups of students in architectural design collaboration. From Egypt, 40students
who worked with Attia at Ain Shams University and eight students from the University of Southern California
School of Architecture who worked with Denton got together as avatars in SecondLife to design a master
plan for the area around the site of the new Grand Egyptian Museum. Near the end of the semester, ve of
the students from Cairo came to California and gave live demonstrations of their designs, meeting their U.S.
counter parts in real life for the rst time. This project returned far more than its investment in time and
money; the cultural exchange between the two groups of students, and the opportunity to develop international
design connections on both sides, contributed not only to their skills but also to their worldviews on culture
and design. As a designer, you can encourage similar cultural exchange programs at your local educational
institutions to enrich their students’ experience and build a cross-cultural design network.
13.3 MATH, MOLECULES, AND MILITARY ENGINEERING
One of the great advantages of virtual environments is the capacity to design in unlimited scale. Just as you
can make a full-scale replica of the Great Pyramids, you can also go in the opposite direction and make scale
models of the tiniest things as shown in Figure13.3.
Dr. Andrew S.I.D. Lang (professor of mathematics, Oral Roberts University); Dr. Peter G. G. Miller
(School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool); and Dr. Joan L. Slonczewski (professor of biology ,
Kenyon College) have all taken that fantastic voyage into microscopic virtual space by utilizing virtual
worlds to create prototypes of molecules.
Design considerations at this scale should focus on the clarity of the structure and consistency of colored
labeling. It is easy to get lost in complex models of proteins or quantum shells, especially if the structure is
too large to see as a whole on a standard camera draw distance, or if it is too small to see its connecting parts
clearly. Other design elements to take into consideration with a molecular exhibit are (1) the background color
and texture of the display, (2) the types of avatar access to the entire model besides craning the camera around
it, and (3) the interactivity of the model and how many ways it distributes related information about itself.
The background behind a model is of paramount importance because, like the setting on a diamond ring,
it supports the observation and understanding of the central element. Nothing in the background should
distract the eye from the structure of the model, so neutral colors or sky backgrounds are preferred. If the
model is in a visually congested area, you may want to enclose it inside a hollow phantom sphere that is
large enough for an avatar to enter. If you put an alpha texture on the exterior face of the sphere and put your
neutral color background on the inside face of the hollow sphere, you have a molecule that is visible from
across the room and will also envelop the avatar into an isolated viewing space as they approach the model
and enter the sphere.
The U.S. military, which has a great number of systems and devices to prototype, has been utilizing virtual
world platforms such as Second Life and OpenSim for several years. When the Naval Undersea Warfare
Center (NUWC) needed to nd a better way to prototype the layout and functionality of the command-and-
control center, they turned to virtual worlds for a solution [3]. What they discovered was that virtual world
prototyping worked well with their security requirements, and that they saved signicant amounts of time
and money during their design meetings because the reviewers could visit the prototype from their desktop
computers. Furthermore, they discovered that these prototypes could become functional training environ-
ments for people as avatars, and that real-time training scenarios could be run to test the efcacy of the
prototype’s overall design.
261Prototyping the Real World in a Virtual Environment
FIGURE 13.3 Science and math prototype models in a virtual environment. Top picture shows, in the foreground,
molecule rezzers created by Dr. Andrew S.I.D. Lang (Hiro Sheridan in Second Life), and in the background are models
of caffeine (C
8
H
10
N
4
O
2
) and theobromine (C
7
H
8
N
4
O
2
) created by Scott Rhoades. Bottom picture shows model of E8
mathematics created by J. Gregory Moxness. This model is an interpretation of two- and three-dimensional perspectives
of the universe’s subatomic particles.
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