This week I’ve been occupied with my main goal of moving all my stuff from the OLN Island to the new UMW only area. So far, I’ve got my entire new room done, but still have to move the old visualization room to go before Wednesday. After I’m done moving, I’ll delete everythign off the OLN island and start with the main project material again.
Here’s a screenshot of my new setup (and to show off the huge size different between my rooms and everything else on the island):
Believe it or not, the trick of using the wireless connection in my dorm instead of the Ethernet actually works! I was able to get on Second Life again today with no problems, so I finished the next version of the room set up, and also bought a lot of lab equipment (beakers, test tubes, etc.) to put on the lab tables once I’m done with the more important stuff. I’ll post a screenshot in here to show everybody what the room now looks like.
As far as my plan for the rest of the semester goes, my main objective is to completely finish the setup and workings of the visualization room. At this point, finishing the room is completely essential, but anything else will be icing on the cake. I’m not sure how many weeks are left (6? 7?) but here’s the plan:
Week 9: Finish the basic setup of the room/Get data and start putting into all parts of the room
Week 10: Finish data and add “lacking” elements (signs, hispanic person)
Week 11: Finish elements and make any necessary modifications to the room
Week 12: Start adding extra aesthetic stuff (lab equipment, room setup)
Week 13: Make sure everything works properly, test a lot
Week 14/15: Deal with any final complications, start on extra stuff that doesn’t need to be finished this semester
That’s roughly what I want to do. I also want to make sure to move my room to the new island, but I didn’t feel like putting that in there (if anyone sees this during the meeting, if I forget, remind me to tell Dr. Polack to send me the data and invite me to the actual island).
And here’s my screenshot of the room so far:
So I think I might’ve figured out a way to get on Second Life…no one really seems to use the wireless connection in Westmoreland, so right now I’m using that to successfully connect. Hopefully this will continue for a long time.
Anyway, I’ve got a bit more to do before Wednesday. I’m currently in the process of remodeling the room to make it much bigger. Also, I put in a back platform with stairs where the second row of desks can sit. I’ve also decided that when I move everything to the new island, I’m probably going to use the invisible trick rather than replicating. Since we’ll have a lot more prims for me to use, this will be easier and faster in the long run. I’ll post some pictures up tomorrow or Tuesday.
So I can’t stand it anymore. Something has to be done about this internet connection problem. This is ridiculous…no matter when I try and sign on to Second Life, the connection is never fast enough to work at school. It’s currently 10:59pm on Tuesday night, and I’ve tried both my Westmoreland connection on my laptop and the Trinkle connection on a lab computer, and neither can get onto Second Life properly. All the objects in the room aren’t downloaded, my character can’t interact with anything, and I can’t even move. My clothes won’t even load correctly!
I really have no clue what to do at this point. I know that sometimes I’ve put off the project for homework in regular classes, but I’ve never gotten this far behind just because I can’t sign into Second Life. In roughly two weeks, the only major amount of time I’ve been able to spend on this project is when I was at home over Fall Break. That obviously won’t work now that I’m back on the school internet connection instead of my own.
What I did accomplish, however, was to make the final version of the lab table (mostly fixed size problems), started to lay out the room as to how I’d want it, and the big thing I did was work on the script to make people appear. If you click on the rightmost white guy, he’ll replicate himself, or if you type “/201 n” where n=1,2,3,…, then you’ll have n copies of the white guy 1 meter next to each other (don’t do more than 4 though, or the extra copies will go out of the room and clog the server). Thus, all I need now is the data for each type of person, and I can easily hard code the numbers into to make a certain number of replications (i think i want rows of 5 people, thus 19 would be 3 rows of 5 and 1 back row of 4). Since there is a slightly delay within replication, for the white person (who will obviously have the largest statistics), I might have the first 5 be invisible instead of pop up on the fly. I’d have photographs for everyone, but I can’t get into Second Life to take pictures…
But yeah, the major problem is that I don’t really know what to do right now about the internet…there’s no way I can stay up until 3-5am every night to work on this project when the internet cools down. I’m not sure it’s really feasible for me to hike to McDonald’s or Hyperion every time I want to use Second Life (and what guarantees that they have a fast enough connection anyway?). I seriously doubt the IT could either give me/the other Second Life people/the Trinkle lab extra bandwidth so we can run Second Life…does anyone have any ideas? (especially everyone else using Second Life). I’m currently at a huge loss right now, and I don’t know what to do before this project gets really backlogged.
This internet connection is really starting to grate me. I can’t really do anything in Second Life, no matter what hour I try (right now at 2am it still doesn’t work). It’s making my project impossible. What am I going to do when I need to test people? Ask them to work at 4 in the morning?
This being said, I’ve gotten a little bit done since the last meeting. I’ve been working on a script to create people on the fly, in case I can’t just hide the people somewhere. I’ve also darkened the desk that’s going to be used. I tried to work with that shapemaker program some more, but I just can’t figure it out. Hopefully I can talk with Dr. Polack before she leaves to figure it out, otherwise I’ll have to create something myself. That and the Hispanic person are my two biggest obstacles right now.
Here are my goals for the next two weeks:
1) Figure out how to create a platform for the back row of the people
2) Set up the room with the lab tables
3)Create a beta of the Hispanic person
4)Figure out and run a test of the people appearing
I hope this goes well. Once this things are done, I’ll basically be done (except for making the signs and coding in real data).
As promised, I have two screenshots to show everyone. The first is of me working with my clickable US region map on the wall. The second is of two potential lab table designs. Currently, I can’t really decide which is better. The one on the right seems more lab-table like than the one on the left, but that one allows you to see under it and see more of the clothes, which can help to distinguish the people (though this might become moot because I might use the front of the table to put my sign with the data). I figure I’ll have everyone voice their opinion here and at the meeting and go with the general consensus. As far as the ring thing goes, I plan on making an elementary one tomorrow (unfortunately, Dr. Polack didn’t give me hers, so it’s currently in the way).
Screenshot 1:
Screenshot 2:
