IDAT204 - Second Life - Whats Next?

Right after doing our project proposal i thought i would do a quick post about what's next for our project.

We decided to give each other tasks, my task for the week is to start advertising the fundraiser inside Second Life. To do this i am going to create a sort of in-game flyer, and hand them out saying to email an email address to sign up to the mailing list. The reason im doing this is because we don't have a guarenteed piece of land, or a confirmed date yet. When these details get confirmed, we will send out an email infoming them.

IDAT204 - Second Life - Examples of gigs

Just thought i would do a quick post with some examples of some gigs done in Second Life i found off youtube.

Heres the links

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr0LlQfy8pA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igxqCY7Ruk0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN7f1LohtsQ

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

IDAT204 - Second Life - Items

After looking at the location possibilities we started talking about what items we could use.

There are two options available to us, one option is to create our own items. The other option is to borrow items.

The first option means that we need to learn the script inside Second Life. After a look around the internet i have found that there are vast resources available for creating objects inside the world. A couple of members from our group actually have experience of building objects. This means that if we cannot find the perfect items to borrow from people then we can just build our own versions.

The second option is basically the way that most users get items inside Second Life. Most users are that friendly that if you go up and ask them, they will give you most of their items they have, unless they have paid for the item normally. This has also led to areas that you can go to and gather 1000's of free items at a time.

IDAT204 - Second Life - Location

After our meeting today as a group we've figured out that our one big problem is going to be location.

We need to find a bit of land that allows us to everything we want.

We have a number of different options, the first option is to purchase some land. This would mean that we could be as free with it as we desire. However the price to purchase land probably makes this option unrealistic.



The second option is to try and contact the people behind Second Life, Linden Lab, to try and convince them to give us free land for a couple weeks. Now we have some official documentation from Childs Play means that we can contact Linden Lab to try and negotiate this.

The third option is to rent some land from someone, instead of just paying a big fee for a bit of land that we only really need for a few weeks, we can rent it from someone instead. This will still give us the freedom we want at a much smaller fee.


A Second Life version of the Roundhouse - Possibility!

The final option we have is to use somewhere that is already being used for playing music, such as a club or bar. However the main problem with this is that they wouldn't give us much freedom over what we can put in there.

IDAT204 - Second Life - Intro to Charity

Well as i explained in my previous post, we have decided to hold a fundraiser on Second Life for a charity of our choice.

The charity we have chosen is called "Child's play". With the money they raise, they improve the standards of living of terminally ill children by purchasing games & games for them.

You can find more information about this charity by going on their website - http://www.childsplaycharity.org/

Their logo -

IDAT204 - Second Life

Well i thought i would post about our new assignment. This assignment is very random, not only do we have to use a virtual reality program called "Second Life", we also have to create an event inside it.

I have a slight experience inside this program, from using it years ago. My one memory of it was logging in, the program being really slow, and seeing someone flying past me. Oh what fun this is going to be.

This project has started well as well... not only do we have to use a program i dont really like, i also missed the 1st lecture, damn plumber! Me missing the 1st lecture meant that i missed the chance to get in a group. Luckily after a brief scare with another group i got put into a group with Luke Best, who i've done many projects with before.

Ive never worked with the other people in the group but they seem focused on doing something cool inside this "program". Lets hope there focus rubs off onto me!

We've come up with a potentially great idea, the idea is to hold a charitable fundraising event inside Second Life. This event will have two sub events going on, the first will be a art auction, the second being a live streaming music gig. The second event is the one im very eager to do, hopefully this idea can be developed further. My next task is to go away and use second life a bit more, and try to get this idea off the ground... Stay posted!

IDAT209 - Stonehouse - 2nd Projection idea

Well once our first projection idea was deemed to be impossible at the moment we set about thinking of a new idea.

This time though, we could start the idea, by thinking of where in the Stonehouse area it's possible to do a decent projection.

My answer to this was the Royal William Yard. The main reason was that most of the buildings in there are offices, this means at night time the yard should be pretty clear. The other reason for this area is that even though there is a road running through it, this road isn't busy during the day at all so should be dead at night time.

The next bit to come up with was what our actual idea for this area. Since day one of this module ive been quite interested with the fact that this area has never really been used to it's full capability. So i started to think, what if?

What if the cooperage, brewery and bakery were used all the time to supply the ships with food & drink.

This thinking has led me to the idea of recreating some of the iconic things around this area. For example, on one of the buildings you would see something that looked like a shadow of a large ship sailing past.

To develop this idea further i thought it would be quite cool for the projection to act like a huge x-ray machine, so when the projector was on, it would show people inside the bakery for example baking bread.

Hopefully Shaun likes this idea and i can start putting it together.

IDAT209 - Stonehouse - 1st Projection idea

Well we finally came up with an idea.

After spending a lot of our time working in the union street area, and more specifically on the palace theatre. We thought why not expand it into the projection brief.

The idea initially came from Louis, his idea was to project some of the famous people that have played in the run down building. However instead of just being the people, it would have the silhouette of them. Similar to the Michael Jackson picture below. These silhouette's would be shown on the multiple doors at the front of the palace theatre.

The idea then developed further when it was suggested that instead of the famous people, we could project a large group of people on the building, so that it would seem there was a crowd outside the theatre. This would create a sort of atmosphere similar to when someone as famous as Laurel & Hardy performed there.

This got me thinking, what if not only do we recreate the atmosphere, why don't we recreate, or upgrade the whole building. Not only project to the front, but project onto the whole building something that will make the building look like it was still open and thriving in the current climate. The idea would of played upon one of the ideas i had for my postcard, to change the palace theatre into something that would look better placed on the world famous Las Vegas strip.

This idea got our entire group really excited, however when we went down to the theatre we soon realised that this idea had some huge flaws.

The first problem we found was that there was a heavy amount of traffic here, meaning that to shine bright lights across the road would mean closing the road. This just isn't possible for this work.

The other massive problem was that we had knowhere to actually set the projecters up. To get the correct distance between the projector and the building meant that we would of had to be so far back that there would be another building in the way.

These two huge problems meant that we had to abandon that idea and try to come up with something else, which is a shame as i really liked this idea, maybe i could try something else in the future when i have the ability to close roads :)

IDAT209 - Stonehouse - Projection examples

Well like i said before ive been looking into some examples of urban projection on the web. Found some really interesting stuff.

One of my group has already sent me a couple links to some pretty amazing stuff on youtube.

here's the links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YADbPYJNGOg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X85A1dCpzsI&NR=1

This videos are so awesome, if i could come up with anything half as good as these then i will be happy.

Heres a link to a company's website that also specialise in projections, they have quite a lot of pretty decent stuff as well - http://www.antivj.com/

http://www.urban-projection.com/ - This blog is pretty good as well for finding loads of urban projections. They have so many videos on there, one of them really caught my eye, where there is a projection being shown that makes it look like someone is painting. pretty cool.

Heres another link to some pretty cool http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/make_television_episode_7_urban_pro.html

Theres only 1 big problem with creating something like this, i think we only have access to one projector. These all have multiple projectors....

Hopefully i can come up with a great idea that only requires the one.

IDAT209 - Stonehouse - Transforming Stonehouse

Well the mapping stage of our work is over and done with now. The next step of our work is to start transforming stonehouse.

To start this we've been told to come up with an idea of a projection. This projection will then be projected onto the side of a building inside the Stonehouse area.

This brief got my imagination racing, now to look into some examples of urban projections i think.

IDAT209 - Stonehouse - 1st time down there

Well ive finally scanned in my original map of my trip down to Stonehouse. Here it is.

Basically this map has lots of notes that i jotted down whilst i was walking around. These notes include interesting key areas, poor areas, burnt out buildings etc...

There are notes on there howevere when i scanned the image in, the black pen that i used hasn't shown up that well.

IDAT209 - Stonehouse Chosen Area

Well i need to choose an area for my project. There are quite a few areas inside the Stonehouse area that i quite like, the main ones are Union Street, the cathedral area, and the naval base.

After looking at the main things i could study in these area, ive decided to work with the area in and around union street. This area interests me for many reasons, mainly though because no matter what time you go around the area there is always the element of not feeling safe.

I think i will look into this for more my main idea, i think my next step is to try and find out how much crime actually goes on in the area, not quite sure how i would do this though. Hopefully a simple search on google will bring this up, however i doubt it.

A plot of land that now stands empty at the end of Union Street, on closer inspection it seems that something, or someone burned the building down.

IDAT209 - Stonehouse Postcard

Well we were asked to create a postcard for this module. We were also meant to print off and post this as well.


I have gone for a simple look to the postcard, the reason i used this idea is because i found something online that i quite liked. I was looking at some images for some inspiration for my previous idea, the "vegas" style Palace Theatre. This is what i found.

IDAT204 -The Digital Organism

Well i've gone through everything behind the organism, the only thing left is to provide you with a link to it.

Here it is. http://www.garrybarter.com/Organism.html

IDAT204 - Behind the Digital Organism Part 2

So like i said previously im just going through my Digital Organism, now im going through some of the difficult parts of the coding, well might not seem difficult to you, but it was to me.

The first part i had a problem with was the random number generator, we needed our program to produce a random number every time the food reset, so that it would randomally place along the "x" axis. This is how we did it.


The second part i had problems with was the collision detection, not only did it need to know that the food had hit something, it also needed to do a number of other things. This is the code we used to get around it.


The third & final main problem i had was with the evolving part of the organism. Not only did it need to run a check to see what state the organism was, it also needed to make the hit square from above grow as the organism grew, so here's the code.

IDAT204 - Behind the Digital Organism

So now i have shown you what our digital organism looks like, next is to talk through some of the code that makes this organism live.

Unlike the previous posts, i am not going to do multiple posts for each part. This post however is simply to show some of my planning before i started working on the coding side of the project. So i decided to take a couple pictures of my thought process before attacking the project. Here they are.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Death of the Helix

This is the final stage of our helix's life cycle, its death. We have made the organism grow by feeding it, however this is also the reason the organism dies. We feel doing it this way gives it a certain irony, which gives it some more depth.

As the quad helix eats more and more we have the helix fading. When it has faded to a certain level parts of the helix start to snap and fall off.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Quad Helix

This is the final "living" stage of our organism's lifecycle. This is the quad helix. As you can see, it looks like a DNA helix, this is where we got our logic from for this project.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Triple Helix

This is the next stage of the Organism's life cycle. This is the triple helix, this is middle point of the life cycle.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Double Helix

Well the next stage of the life cycle is the first step where you can start see the DNA idea coming through.

This is the double helix stage.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Single Helix

So like i said in the previous post, i am just going to do some posts about each part of the life cycle of our Organism.

After the blob comes the single circle helix, this helix is an early version of the DNA helix idea, and is pretty self explanatory.

Here it is.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Helix

So we've decided to create our idea based around a Helix. The idea of the Helix basically comes from something Luke found online, our idea has taken it a step further by thinking that we could make it grow to end up looking like a strain of DNA. In the next few posts i will talk about each version of the helix throughout it's life cycle.

The first step of the life cycle will be a small blob, to advance the small blob will have to eat a small circle, this circle we see as food. The idea to use the small circle is carrying on from the DNA idea, instead of just making it react as DNA would react, we have decided to work on the biology side of things. So the white dot moving up the screen, on a red background, is a play of the idea of a white blood cell. In the human body, white blood cells help skin grow back over wounds etc, that is what our white dot will do, help the organism grow.

Anyways enough about the food idea, here is our version of the blob, pretty simple so far.

IDAT204 - Digital Organism Update

Well we decided to change our initial idea for this project, to begin with we were trying to create a digital organism based around a zombie outbreak, however this idea was not realistic to make for the timescale we were given.

So we decided to come up with a new idea, the idea is based around a helix which evolves when it feeds. To evolve the helix simply multiplies.

When the helix reaches a certain size it runs out of room, then it slowly dies as it eats more food.