ABSTRACT
The future of virtual reality (VR) and virtual worlds looks bright. Head-mounted displays, 3D scanning software, and new haptic technologies are developing rapidly for use in web-based virtual worlds and virtual gaming environments. As the capacity to present us with full-blown immersive 3D increases with these devices, the design of a virtual environment is even more important. A designer of virtual environments frames the focus and creates the scaffolding for interaction and presence-based immersion. The design also provides the visitor with a means for understanding the underlying message in these spaces. The key word is “message.” A 3D virtual space without a message or story to tell is just another 3D tour. Perhaps the visuals are stunning, and it may take you to places you cannot go otherwise like deep space, but at the end of the tour, what have you learned? What emotions did you feel? How did the virtual reality experience add an understanding of yourself or your reality? Obviously, these are tough questions to answer. Jaron Lanier, a noted computer scientist and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality said,
With the words from Lanier in mind, ask yourself this question. How can I, the designer of virtual worlds, leverage the effects of virtual reality to impact our real-world perspective? For instance, suppose you wanted to create a virtual environment to teach students about the relative physical scale of life on earth. Now as you design, work backward from the emotional and intellectual state you would like the students to be in when they exit the virtual environment. If you want them to experience a state of heightened awareness regarding their human scale as it compares to an ant or whale, your virtual environment needs to demonstrate this. You may choose to just show them an ant and a blue whale in actual 1:1 scale, but that may not make any more impact than taking them to see ant and whale displays in a museum. Let us suppose you choose to demonstrate the scale of these animals by changing the scale of a familiar object, something the students use every day, their desks. Imagine that the students enter the virtual world, and see that their avatars are sitting at a
desk that looks just like the real one they are sitting in for the demonstration. Then slowly, the desk begins to enlarge in scale, so that their avatars’ bodies now are the same size as an ant standing on the seat of the desk. They can look at each other, maybe some of them grew antennas or developed ant-like mandibles, there may even be some real ants roaming around with them across the vast plane of the desk chair seat. At some point in the demonstration, the environment begins to fill with water and their avatar bodies begin to morph into aquatic forms. The familiar desk chair shrinks as they begin to experience what it is like to be an enormous marine mammal. The class has become a pod of blue whales. All of them are so large it is difficult to see the tails on some of them, and way down below is a tiny student desk resting on the bottom. After a recreational play period with their new aquatic forms, the students once more morph back into humans, and emerge from the virtual environment sitting at their real desks. I believe that it is unlikely that many of those students will ever look at an ant or a whale in quite the same way, or accept the scale of their human bodies as the standard measure for building all environments. As you may recall from Chapter 3, Section 3.4, semiotics and the use of symbols in design is a significant part of our virtual world experience. What kinds of text, graphics, verbal commentary, visual media, and other sorts of signs and symbols could be used in the ant-whale demonstration to create purpose, meaning, and mood? The term game-based has been used throughout this book to describe a virtual environment that presents the visitor with the opportunity for playing a game or interacting with other visitors within the context of a set of guidelines or rules. How can the ant-whale environment be developed into a game-based sim? In this chapter we shall discuss some aspects of how game-based virtual environments might be developed. Here are some of the key concepts:
• A virtual environment design for a game-based sim is more than storytelling; it creates a visual context, an interactive space, and a sandbox for the imagination.
