Up and Running

This break has been a success for my project.  Over the past few days, I did all of the super tedious/long/boring work of creating/cropping/uploading the signs, and today I created a system to add them into the visualization.  All that’s left of the main functionality of the room is to finish the Hispanic person and change the look of the room.  If we decide to do the high school data, it’ll take a while to add more signs, but beyond that it won’t be hard.

Here’s a screenshot of the visualization in action:

A Couple Things

So this past week has been pretty terrible school-work wise; I haven’t been able to do anything in Second Life.  Hopefully I can do a bit over the weekend before Monday, but if not, I think I’ll spend a bit of Thanksgiving break grinding out the more repetitive parts of the visualization design.

I did, however, make an outline for my paper.  Except for the introduction, I think it’s pretty good.  I more or less based it off my summer powerpoint presentation, and added in a couple things.   I really don’t know what to do for the introduction, so if anyone has some clarification info or just general feedback on my outline I’d really appreciate it.

 Paper Outline: (sorry about the spacing, but WordPress seems to double space for some terrible reason)

Introduction

       -Explain project/premise (similar to summer abstract?)

       -?

 

Background

       -what census/data is

       -transportation/education data and specifics that go with them

       -how you get data/sift through it

       -explain visualizing and show screenshot of 2d data

       -flaws with 2d version and pick of second life

       -explain about second life/classes/worlds

       -go through processes/stages of building the first room (summer)

       -go through process/stages of building the second room (fall)

 

Experiment

      -describe what it tests

      -makeup of the questions

      -premise of experiment

      -subject profile

 

Results

     -accuracy

     -speed

     -satisfaction

 

Conclusion

     -where project is going with visualizations

     -new tests on more people

     -pinpoint exactly why one is better than the other

The Promised Goods

Not only do I have a screenshot of the room in action, but I also have the first beta of the Hispanic person.  Warning:  it doesn’t look amazing (I find it to be the hardest one to do), but I think does the basic job ok.  If anyone has anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to let me know.

The Room in Action:

Hispanic Person Beta 1:

Some Real Progress

Ok, so this week has been pretty fruitful. Dr. Polack sent me the data, so I started to write the main code for the gut of my visualization. If you now click on the map, I have the black table and asian table showing the correct amount of people. Putting in the white won’t be hard at all, and the hawaiian/indian ones will be piece of cake (mostly because they don’t show up at all). All that will be left is to make the Hispanic person and display him (I won’t be done of course, but with the really important stuff I will).

My only design qualm is the rounding I’ve had to undertake. I’ve decided to give anything between 1-7% 1 person, anything 7-12% two people, 13-17.5% percent 3, etc. This creates a slight problem because I sometimes end up with one too many people on the floor, so I just delete one from the white person category to compensate (considering each time the white person has 15 or more, I don’t feel so bad about it). This means the visualizations won’t be exact, but I don’t feel so bad about that since it’s supposed to approximate to a reasonable degree to make the data easier to understand.

In the next day or two I’ll post a screenshot of what the working visualization looks like (however, it’ll be much better on Wednesday to just try it out in front of everyone since it’s moving).