It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a general update on my thoughts toward the project, so I figured I’d spend a little time tonight outlining my ideas since the last one. My biggest accomplishment so far: my clickable US map. From the written details of it, I thought it would much harder to do than it was. Luckily, last Tuesday I was in a huge programming mood, and worked on it for roughly 5 hours. The finished project was actually quite beautiful in my opinion (and apparently nothing like it exists in SecondLife to anyone else’s knowledge). Since then, I made the states even more clear, and plan to tweak it a tiny bit if needed.
The next major event was my meeting with Dr. Polack. After talking with her, I have a much clearer idea as to what the second dataset should be: type of commute to work in urban areas. Though this might not be the most exciting data in the world, it has much more interesting visual implications than income did or obesity did: the plan we’ve come up with together is to have the types of transportation (i.e. cars, public transport, walking, etc.) as the dynamic choice (similar to the US Map in the education one), and the data would be represented as percentages on top of a huge, regional map of the United States on the floor (what the representation on top of the floor will be, however, is still up for grabs). This shouldn’t be too hard to do, as vehicles are quite commonplace in SecondLife.
Also, we discussed my primary idea, the racial data in education visualizations. After thinking it through for a while, I’ve decided I need to pick a certain level of education to choose. Right now I’m leaning toward Bachelor’s. Nothing below it would very interesting data (high school is meh data), but I think PhD might be too high to have a large, representative data set. One flaw in my visualization, however, might be that people objects are extremely hard to come across. At the time of my meeting with her, I had probably spent 3-4 man hours just in search of possible candidates, with nothing really to show. However, on Friday, I happened to come across the right person at the right time. This guy had made some male mannequin objects, and weren’t bad as general displays of the human form. He was selling two males and a female for L$499, so I offered him L$1000 for each custom mannequin he could produce. Tonight he showed the first one I had him try, the Hawaiian. Believe it or not, it actually looked pretty good! No one would mistake it for a real avatar with person behind it, but I definitely think the mannequin looked good enough for my uses. I gave him a couple suggestions (adding a face, getting rid of the “mannequin” elbows, etc.), which he said he would have ready by tomorrow. After he shows me the updated version, I’m going to take a screenshot to Dr. Polack and see what she thinks. I have a feeling she’ll like it though; if for no other reason, she’s just as attached to my idea for education as I am. One potential problem though: I wanted to have the people sitting in prearrange desks, but I don’t think that will work anymore. The reason? Well, the guy’s mannequins are standing up, and it might make them look really weird to be sitting down. Also, in order to show the data together to make sense, I think I’m going to need “clusters” of people…maybe I’ll have the desks all set up, but the people somewhere else in the room, like role is being called?
Other than those specific updates,I’ve continuously been taking classes and reading, and am getting more comfortable with the language all the time (I just made Greta a demo on invisibility and phantom prims haha). I was talking with a classmate in my object-communication class, and he was giving me ideas on how top copy the objects for my visualization and importing the data. If things go accordingly, this project should go to plan quite nicely.
