ABSTRACT
As a virtual world designer, you are a poetic architect [1]. Your design approach, or point of view, is formulated from observations of life and creative expression. You work with the aesthetic proportions of architecture, landscape, clothing, and character avatars. Your understanding of the underlying meanings and metaphors of form, shape, and color are intrinsic to what you create. As a designer, you will work with ideas big and small, hidden and obvious, on many levels simultaneously, as you explore the underlying interconnections of a virtual environment, which we shall call the vizome, a portmanteau of virtual and rhizome. Introduced in Chapter 1, Section 1.5.1, the vizome represents all that connects us in a virtual world. It is the stuff that our virtual world experience is made from, and as a designer you will be immersed in it. Following are some key ideas related to the process of designing within the vizome, which we will explore in the following sections of this chapter.
