Responsive Environment

Our space has minimal responsive elements, but each of which does apply to its effective area. The purpose of the space is to use fear as an incentive for avatars to complete the maze. At the same time, it gives the person a sense of accomplishment upon completion of the maze. With this in mind, it is essential that the sounds do not frighten the avatars so much that they just teleport away.

The first responsive element is the use of lure. Basically, what happens is that there are a group of natives already performing the ritual on the sacred ground. This is to establish a fake crowd, which gravitate avatars in. However, once approached, these natives would disappear. In other words, we have created an illusion to draw people in. And once that has happened, there will be others to join in and hence creating a social enticement. A second responsive element is again, the sound element. However, this is not similar to the first interactive sound whereby it is activated by passing through the transparent wall. The third responsive element is the skeletal hands. All the hands are pointing directly towards the goal and has a sensor, so that each time it is approached, the colour would tell the avatars exactly how close they are. If the avatars do not understand this, they can touch it, and prompts the riddle, “Our Souls know where … Our hands will get you there”, to guide them.

Collaboration Process + Social Interaction + Interactivity

COLLABORATION

Upon merging the design, we had to ask ourselves a few questions; how can you combine these spaces? Are we going to compensate each space equally? Are we going to sacrifice one in order to achieve something greater and more meaningful? After merging, does it tell the story? And what is the story?

So we had to consider the different strengths and weaknesses of our spaces and the best method is to work with all the strengths and its most appropriate (and applicable) area, and maybe perhaps improve on those weaknesses so that they may become the strengths.

Dance Club

Strengths

- A strong sense of enticement and gathering

- Heavy interaction between people

Weaknesses

- In the virtual world, limited to only dance

- Enticement does not last long

Hell

Strengths

- Strong establishment of tone

- Outside of the ordinary street community

Weaknesses

- Low level of interaction

- Cannot be defined as a social space

Zen Garden

Strengths

- Peaceful nature

Weaknesses

- Limit interaction

There were several ideas like a Haunted House, Scary Garden and the Halloween Dance Club, featuring a roller coaster and a combination of the aforementioned, which was ALMOST the hands-down decision. However, because the ideas were so weak, we had to break it down to less literal and direct approaches. Rather than Hell, Zen Garden, and Dance Club as a whole, we broke it down to the very small aspects of each, resulting in Fear, Peace, and Gathering respectively. Using these ideas, along with a story I have written recently, we were able to come up with a sacred space with a maze, as mentioned previously. During designing of our space, we communicated, mainly using MSN and IM Chat in Second Life. Also, we would hold meetings in-between breaks and sometimes on Wednesday, our day off.

SOCIAL INTERACTIVITY

The social interactivity between avatars can be determined by the number of avatars present and how the avatars experience the space. For example, if there is only one person there, the fear may be maximized, but it may give them a sense of adventure. If there is a group, then the fear would be minimized and asks avatars to collaborate with each other as the paths taken would affect one another (described below).

INTERACTIVITY

So, what is so interactive about this space? The top space features a ritualistic dance which alludes to sacrificial ceremonies or worship within the indigenous cultures. The multiple pads along the ground allow avatars to dance as part of these ceremonies. For this reason, they become a part of the ceremonies and hence become more attached. The allusion here also, is because some people may not know the ritual’s purpose; they do not know why they are really dancing or what they are getting themselves into. The second interactivity is the spheres above the flame. Avatars that use these circles will be automatically transported to the underground maze. There is a symbolism in the flame and it is commonly seen in movies and sometimes reported by real life figures. The action here is the sense of epiphany. Instead of so, the “soul” is given a test of courage, given with the maze which used fear as an incentive to complete it. The third interactivity is the walls of the maze. With each touch, some walls are able to move away but at the same time, block off other passageway. The last one, which is unnoticed, is the collision of the transparent walls. A collision of these specific walls would activate sounds. But because these are transparent walls, the experience feels as if the sound occurred from within the space, and hence intensifying the fear.

The Ghost Of Pagoda Valley (Scope)

On March 13^th, 1872, an expedition led by the Archibald von Dimitri explored the southern province of Bassett. However, communication was lost after their arrival in the Pagoda Valley and wave after wave of search parties were sent, but none were able to recover his team. After three painful years or search, Archibald’s team was proclaimed dead. But on the winter of that year, the whole expedition team returned but residents stated that they were not the people they once were and none of them were willing to explain what had happened during their absence. As of that day, the phenomenon was then referred to as The Ghost of Pagoda Valley.

Throughout the years, many explorers and, eventually, documentary film-makers labeled the valley as the Phenomenon of the Century, claiming that anyone able to solve the mystery would make history. Scientist had explained this as the ripping of the universe, creating a worm-hole to another dimension and that explaining would deem them as insane; whereas skeptics believe it to be a man-made trap door and that those who were taken as hostage were forced not to reveal the secret.

Digital Story-Telling

For Design Project 3, I have teamed up with Wirada Deerajviset and Stephen Wang. Each individual are very diversely different. What that means is that there is hardly any relation between each of them. My space is a typical “Friday-Night-Out” Dance Club; Wirada’s space alludes to her vision of Hell and Naraka (levels of Hell, in religious beliefs); and Stephen’s space being a Zen Garden where people play Go (a traditional chess-like game).

There were several ideas like a Haunted House, Scary Garden and the Halloween Dance Club, featuring a roller coaster and a combination of the aforementioned, which was ALMOST the hands-down decision. However, because the ideas were so weak, we had to break it down to less literal and direct approaches. Rather than Hell, Zen Garden, and Dance Club as a whole, we broke it down to the very small aspects of each, resulting in Fear, Peace, and Gathering respectively. With that, we were able to create a sacred ground with an underground maze with allusion to a story.

The story is titled, “The Ghost of Pagoda Valley”, it is about the strange disappearance of travellers when they explored the southern province of Valefor (fictional). These travellers would return after a time period (not uniform), but as a changed man, and unwilling to recount on the events that took place. This is a story I written recently as part of my own leisure.

There have already been some examples of similar spaces in films such as Indiana Jones and Armour of God II; or such global sites such as indigenous sacred grounds. In the sense of elemental aspects, fear in this case, we endorse films (yes, again) especially Saw II where the victims were escaping the seemingly unsolvable maze and hearing the various sounds and such. But each of these examples tells the same thing differently. One has an action/adventure feeling with broad daylight and the other is thriller/horror with an enclosed space and dark atmosphere.

But how are “we” going to tell this story to everyone? For this project, we considered rather than following the conventional narrative-movie storytelling, we decided to use more of an art form. In this case, we are using scenery and experiences; let the people tell themselves of their own story. This is because different people have different levels of imagination and for this reason; they would experience this space differently.

More in-depth information would be in the upcoming blogs.

A Notice To Notice

Because this final assignment is rather huge for me and I want everything to be smooth and comfortable for my tutors and ‘viewers’, I was thinking that I wipe out all the posts related to this assignment and start from scratch, just so that everyone has a smooth flow when reading these blogs. In other words, so that they are reading the flow of the Jackey of today and not the Jackey of each separate day.

On the top of that, because the idea has change over-time, each post are inconsistent. So I hope my later posts would get my viewers back on track

Responsive Environment

The nature of this space is to induce fear into the avatar rather than the actually person. In this case, if the person was the avatar in the real world, he/she would feel intimidated and scared when they have been snatched away from the ground and sucked into the maze.

As this space is a completely sealed off, the avatar must walk through the maze, yet to be enhanced with sound etc., and conquer it while being subdued by the evil lurking within. Basically, the avatar would feel overwhelmed as the true path to freedom is sealed off by walls which, in fact, are animate to move on command (in this case, touch). However, the same wall would seal off another pathway giving the a sense of deja vu or such. This effect helps reinforce the insecurity and fear for avatars being in here for the first time. In a sense, it is similar to the idea from the popular Saw franchise and puzzles found in common RPG games. What makes it a social interaction may be the group of “poor souls” would have to work together to find the way out as walls seal off each other’s path.

Another responsive is the aforementioned, unexpected teleportation of the avatars. Because the space resembles a familiar cultural phenomenon, avatars/people would go to see this place for a sense of adventure. The campfire (others yet to be decided) act as a venus-fly trap ready to sink its ‘jaws’ down and trap avatars. Here, once the avatar has spent some time within the premise of the flame, the avatars are teleported to the corners of the maze and thus, the previous scare begins.

Script For Sliding Walls

Basically, the logic behind this script is that when the object is touched, it will move 2.5m in the negative direction (or left) and then 2.5m in the positive direction (right). This step is repeated continually and will never change unless the original script is changed.

integer es;
default
{
state_entry()
{
es = 0;
}
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
vector er = llGetScale();
if(es == 0)
{
llSetPos(llGetLocalPos() – <0,2.5,0>);
es = 1;
}
else
{
llSetPos(llGetLocalPos() + <0,2.5,0>);
es = 0;
}
}
}

The Haunting

Collaboration Process

THE HAUNTING – COME FOR THE SCARE … STAY FOR THE STARE … LIVE FOR THE DANCE

Partners:

Wirada – Haunted House

Jackey – Dance Club

Stephen – Garden/GO-Game

Having two partners with conflicting themes is already hard enough … And look what the dude and dudette did. They threw in another meat.
The main issue was to compromise with each design. I personally felt bad for them to move away from their ideas to work with mine, so we agreed to conduct further research. It was challenging with the three themes, but we were able to formulate an idea based on works already created by designers whether virtual or real.

The most commonly found example is a Halloween dance party, but it none were able to work, harmoniously, with Stephen’s idea of a garden/GO-Games. So, we decided to redesign the top space.

Wirada and I joined the top space together to create a haunted garden which  reveals a sense of fear, if not, otherwise, adventure and excitement. The benefit of this is that, avatars are now aware of who we are.

My dance club is now literally pulled down to hell to reveal a sense of descension and hell. The major strength of this space is that it has a strong sense of interactivity with the dancing (I tried to make it visually more appealling to establish the mood). The problem is that there is only dancing involved and nothing more. SO, we incorporated a horror-themed roller-coaster ride from Wirada space. This roller-coaster moves through the space in a snake-like pattern and runs through images, scares and the what-not to also establish and reinforce the mood. And latter, exit through Stephen’s space to the garden.

Now we are at Stephen’s space, where there is an object to allow avatars to switch between horror and peace. If at horror, avatars leave the area with reinforced memories. If at peace, avatars leave the area with a calmed memory. However, the weakness of this approach is that it is not determinable [a word?].

The Haunting Video

Halloween Theme Dance Club

Halloween … We don’t have that here in Australia … Not in a traditional celebration sense anyway … But, we did celebrate a thing with a Halloween sort of theme. That is the Zombie Walk. You don’t believe me check this out: Sydney Zombie Walk. We also have miniature events like the Haunted House or those oOOooOo aAAaaAa theme park rides. So, we then move onto horror-themed dance clubs, a very fantastical way to party. Several films and real-life parties feature horror-themes. Who remembers the movie, “Idle Hands” where the prom was not the typical suit/glamorous dress-code, but rather wearing Frankenstein and Dracula and WHO COULD FORGET JESSICA ALBA WEARING THE ANGEL-OUTFIT? Mind you, I am not like those typical “dogs” out there.

Anyway, my point is, there are not many Halloween-themed thingies in Australia, and at the same time, the virtual world. You know why? Because anyone who has done it have not been giving the message out. The way that this is done is through story-telling.

The following two images are from Flickr. Both show the same party but an interesting blend between a typical dance party and Halloween. It may be possible that this was a Halloween party, but imagine a dance club with this theme. Swati once mentioned about attending the “biggest dance party” where everyone has to wear white. Now imagine, the dance party where everyone dresses up. We’ve had the masquarade and we’ve had those dance party. Let’s bring in a new level to dancing.

The story begins with a setting. The setting establishes the beginning to our fantasies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPWQm0cUsu0

This video is from a movie titled, “Forced Nightmare” and perhaps, my only found record of a ‘possible’ horror-theme dance club. The story immediately shows that this is indeed a dance club, though I ignored the music (for internal issues), and that this is where people socialize. The camera immediately turns to all the dancers in there costumes. I may not be able to convince you, but the technical date is not Halloween there, except this is a horror movie and that the Hong Kong director thought this idea was cool or hip.