Today felt very “off” for me, and I’m not really sure why. Usually I’m pretty good at being self-motivated for this project (I’m having a lot of fun!), but I wasn’t really feeling right today. Sure, my itemized list of activities is full enough (and in reading the list it sounds likes a bit of work), but it doesn’t really feel like I accomplished what I want to do.
After thinking about it for a while, I have a suspected reason for why I’m so “meh” right now: everything I did for the project was a loose end of some sort. I built a guardrail for/modified the platform, textured the walls, put on the “bubbles”, and messed around the with African-American mannequin. Essentially, these are all things I had to do at one point but just hadn’t gotten to yet. I know the project won’t always feel like this, but it’s still a disheartening to do so much but have it feel like so little.
Anyway, if I’m to do this right, I can’t spend much time moping. I’m not really sure what tomorrow will bring though. Part of me wants to work on some more odds and ends (figuring out what do about signs for the vehicles, cleaning up the display map, edit the mannequins), and I’ve finally realized why: for some reason, I’m actually scared of moving farther ahead. I know I don’t have too much longer to go before I reach the true meat of this project, the 3-d visualization. It’s not even that I think it will be really hard (not saying it’s easy either), but this is where a lot of my ideas are going to hit the battlefield. Hopefully most will survive, but you never know…
Beyond the few odds and ends I listed before, here are the major questions I need to answer soon: Where am I going to store the data and how am I going to handle the object communication? How exactly am I going to handle creating and displaying my own bar chart? With the two choices for data and one for vehicle, how am I going to do the interface for picking in the first place? Where should I put the signs so that they will be convenient AND readable? Should there be some sort of constant identifier as to which vehicles/type are being visualized (i.e. glowing, an arrow, etc.)? Where will I put the choices for type of visualization?
My tentative outline on the object communication: The vehicles will do nothing but send an object identifier (probably a number 1-5 rather than name) to the map, which will be listening to vehicle-specific channel and change it’s global vehicle variable accordingly. At the same time, the map will also have another listener event going on. This one will instead listen to the two potential styles of visualization choosers, which will probably only send some sort of number 1 or 2. I think the map object itself will probably house all the data for now, lest I think of some snappy way to have the vehicles/style objects send that information over (which would be preferable for robust programming practices, but not really essential). After giving it some thought, there will probably need to be some sort of “Visualize” button at the bottom of the map that the user will click to clear the map and see the data. I used to think the map would be dynamic to where every choice would change it immediately, but that’s probably too cumbersome and confusing.
I could continue on this for a while, but it’s starting to get a bit fuzzy at this point; I really need to start implementing things before those ideas will become any more concrete. Though I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, I know the future of this will be far greater.
June 12, 2007 at 6:03 pm |
Ok, I kind of got the feeling that you were not into this today. Each time I asked you a question it was as if I was bother you. Which is ok, research can be that way. But you need to move on. The visualization part on the outside is almost done for the vehicles. You need to put up signs on each of the vehicles and bring the US map into paint and make better regional text labels. After that you are done with the look and feel of the room.
You do not have to be bothered by your lack of confidence on moving on. It happens to all of us. It is important that you start the data processing part. We need to get some test subjects in next week. I will probably give my class extra credit to do this so I would like those 10 to have the opportunity to do so. What is the worse thing that can happen; we find out that this isn’t any better, who cares, that is what research is about. Finding out whether your idea is good. People at the conference already told me they think it is cool. I believe them but it might be cool for people who are already in SL and want new and different things to look at. That might be future research, to actually get people who are already in SL to look at this and take the same kind of survey. Who knows but research is funny that way. I hope that we would continue this project outside of the summer and then we can look at how people already familiar with SL view the data versus those that are not (which we will have this summer).
1.) The Bar Chart….create simple cube objects that look like bars in a bar chart.
2.) The Choice for Which Option to Select (Put a sign up that says Choice 1 Click Here or another sign Choice 2 Click Here). We will give them a sheet of paper explaining what the choices are. However for the true user who know second life have notes that they can read and keep or discard
3.) Let’s try to put the signs on the back wall, one on the left (choice 1) and one on the right (choice 2) of the big map. We can always move them. Make the text large
4.)
June 12, 2007 at 6:09 pm |
4.) Create all the bars for all the data (it is a finite set). Each bar will have a number and when the appropriate vehicle is select make the bars visible.
5.) For the piles do the same thing. Create a box with the image of the vehicle and set up little doggy piles for each of the % and make them visible when selected.
Since the data is static you do not need to import it, you can create the object ahead of time, make them invisible and appear when necessary. You can also just put in the percentages the same way. While this is not perfect because data does change it will get you up and running with the data. If you find something better then we can always change it.
June 13, 2007 at 6:53 am |
I also wanted to reassure you that EVERYONE doing research has days like this. I think that it was great that you were able to think through why you were feeling blah about the project. If you just keep plugging away, you’ll get to a moment when you have a breakthrough or really feel like you accomplished something and then you’ll have energy to spare again. This will happen soon, I swear