Wonderland 0.4 – Demo video
What to notice
It’s helpful to understand that Wonderland has been envisioned as a platform for working/collaboration across distance. It provides a more immersive experience than you could achieve with current available technologies such as video and phone conferencing, web-conferencing and chats.
Two things to consider in a virtual environment are its capacity to facilitate users achieving specific tasks alone and together and its effectiveness at compensating for the missing sensory and contextual information we take for granted when we’re face to face.
The first point is not difficult to address. We call it task analysis, which means you break down a task into small components (sub-tasks) in order to understand how to design learning it. It gets tricky when you must also consider sensory and contextual information needed. We easily recognize the barriers to learning created by a classroom with fixed seating, inadequate lighting or instructional equipment, the same holds true in a virtual environment. Most of use use classrooms, we don’t build them. And we may walk into a technologically sophisticated room like our Learning Research Studio and have to learn how to use it technically and pedagogically.
So lots of things to think about.
Watch this video and you’ll see how Wonderland developers are designing for accomplishing specific tasks as well as compensating for missing sensory and contextual information. For example, when an avatar is speaking his body gestures and his name title (above his head) pulsates. This facilitates verbal communication and compensates for some of the visual information we have when we talk to people face to face. What else?
Suzanne
First person/Mouse View and designing space
In virtual environments you have a first person view. It’s when your viewpoint is as it is in real life, through your (avatar’s) eyes. It provides a more visually immersive experience than when you’re view is third person, or over your avatar’s shoulder.
In Second Life, it’s called mouseview and it’s a rather visually awkward experience. (I should take a mini survey of SLers, but my guess is that the majority use 3rd person view most of the time.) Your field of vision is better. The reason SL mouseview is awkward is because your field of vision is at about 25%; you have no peripheral vision to speak of.
In Project Wonderland, you can adjust your field of vision and add peripheral vision to your 1st person view. What a noticeable difference that makes, all of a sudden being in the 1st person, feels like it does in the physical world.
But as I was walking around with my improved 1st person view, I still had trouble navigating the space, although it’s incredible unbuilt. I realized the absence of the typical markers we rely in actual space to navigate our way around, everything from walkways, to doors, to signposts, to familiar structures. I’ve notices this in SL on and off, the degree to which a space has been designed for way finding, for easy navigation and understanding what the space is for. Just some of the issues that come up when we begin designing learning in such a space.
