Last month, we were happy to be able to go to Pittsburgh to cover the Game Education Summit, held at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. We got some nice interviews, including the conversation with ETC Pittsburgh Director Drew Davidson, which we featured on Episode 206 of the podcast. While I’m going to have another entry soon that will be specifically about some of my thoughts on the Game Education Summit, since I’ve gotten back, I’ve had to literally burn the midnight oil to get Virtual Morgantown looking and running the way I want it for this stage in the project. As I’ve been sitting here opening each model in SketchUp, cleaning up what I can, and exporting them to the XNA application as .X files (many, many thanks for Zbyl’s .X Exporter plugin!), I am continually reminded of the challenges in working at this scale after coming from a GIS background.

As you can zoom in and essentially immerse yourself at a nearly 1:1 scale in the virtual world, issues that never would have mattered suddenly become vital. Even Google Earth, World Wind, ArcGIS Explorer, any of the virtual globes aren’t really meant to be used at that scale, as their background imagery and 3D models look best from a viewpoint well above ground level. So, when you get down to the ground, and are actually representing real features, you have to give each one at least some individual attention. It’s often the opposite of the way most of us are trained. Rather than looking for commonalities and creating data layers that characterize those similarities, you have to bring out the aspects that might make a particular feature unique.

It’s a strange notion for a lot of geographers and GIS people, I think, to change their perspective from starting with a zoomed-out view of the world and then drilling down toward individual features to starting with the viewpoint of a single person in the world and then have to move and explore in order to identify and understand the nature of the virtual environment you’re immersed in. And, the more you’re drawn into the virtual world, the more obvious the individual differences become, and the more important it is for the creator of the simulation or interactive environment to pay attention to those small design details that help form a sense of actually experiencing the virtual world.

As I have progressed from childlike wonder and delight over my ability to create a simple XNA application with real-world terrain data, to relief when each one of my new functions actually builds and runs or when I get my model assets adjusted to just the right location and height, I am becoming even more of a believer in taking gaming technology and design seriously, and looking at how we can create virtual world applications that integrate aspects from many different areas, from gaming to GIS and geospatial to geography, and even history and other disciplines.

The same thing is true in the gaming world. There are commonly used interfaces and elements of design that are easily recognizable to gamers and, based on experience, they intuitively know how to interact with these UIs in different game environments. More importantly, these mechanisms for interaction help to enhance the sense of immersion within the virtual world. And that’s one of the key things I have to figure out for my own project: how to keep the user’s sense of being immersed in the virtual landscape, while still providing them with useful (I hope) information on the elements within that landscape.

So, what are some of the examples of interactive UI elements that I can employ? The simplest is for the user to navigate and explore the virtual world and, when he or she comes into close proximity of a particular feature that I want to give more information about, some piece of digital media will pop up. It might be a historical photo, a snippet of text information, an audio clip, whatever. The main thing is that this type of interaction is pretty passive; the user doesn’t have to do anything other than get to the spot where the media is located. This is close to the methods of spatializing multimedia we first tried in our research into extending traditional GIS interfaces a few years back, and various forms of embedded media are common now in web maps and virtual globes.

What I want to do, though, is get beyond that, and bring more dynamic interaction mechanisms from game design into my virtual world. For example, in RPGs (Role Playing Games), the typical interface is a series of menus that that give you access to various functions you can perform or status updates you can view. These menus do take you out of the virtual world briefly, since they pause the drawing of the graphics and slide the menu screens over the view, but experienced users can quickly scroll through options, perform tasks and return to the landscape view without losing their sense of immersion. As an RPG (really, Final Fantasy) fan myself, that’s the first example that comes to mind, but there are lots more interaction types that I want to consider. This diary entry is getting pretty long, though, so I’m going to save them for next time….

We’ve been giving demos of our virtual world work in our VR CAVE this week, both the older ArcScene projects and the new XNA application, and I’ve been really happy with the response we’ve been getting from people in lots of different fields. One common theme with the visitors that I’ve talked to is that many of them have kind of heard about gaming technology, serious games, or virtual worlds, but they didn’t really get what people were talking about until they were able to see it actually working. Once they got over the initial WOW factor, it was fun to watch GIS professionals, city planners, and educators start brainstorming with ideas about these applications could be used for all kinds of projects. After all the frustrating hours spent hunched over a keyboard staring at a stupid 3D model and wondering why the roof isn’t square, or screaming at the computer because clearly it is incapable of understanding my perfectly written code, it is really nice to see that we are creating something that people appreciate and can see the value of.

I was most interested in seeing what people thought of a project done by the graduate students in the new Geovisualization class that I co-taught this semester with Jesse and Dr. Trevor Harris. It was the first time we had offered an actual advanced class on the concepts, implementation, and issues related to geovisualization. We especially focused on virtual worlds and landscape reconstruction, immersive environments and the broader concepts of immersion and interaction, and how platforms like the VR CAVE are utilized to present virtual world applications. As the main project for the class, the grad students put together (in ArcScene) a really great example of a small 3D digital city test application, demonstrating how you can utilize visualization to show zoning, urban planning, infrastructure like sewers, and use the digital city to monitor infrastructure and generate long-range plans. As their final presentation, we set the project up in the CAVE, and it turned out so well, it’s now becoming one of our main demos.

The digital cities concept is one we’ve been giving a lot of thought to since we had a chance to attend Autodesk University back in December and talk to Doug Eberhard, who is spearheading Autodesk’s Digital Cities Initiative. So far, digital cities projects seem to be coming from larger, forward-looking cities who have the resources and people with vision to see the potential. What I’m really intrigued by, though, is the enormous potential of a digital city concept for small cities and even rural areas, where citizen government is often hampered by limited resources and policymakers and stakeholders who want to do what’s best, but are often overwhelmed by the amount of expertise required to make really informed decisions. I think that working 3D digital city models could allow large amounts of complex information to be visualized in a much easier to understand visual format that could be more readily understood by policymakers, experts and interested citizens alike, who would feel more comfortable participating in decision-making and planning discussions.

While we’ve been talking about this idea for a few months and we’ve spoken to a number of people who agreed that the notion of 3D infrastructure modeling for small cities sounds great, we’ve now got a working project to actually SHOW people what we are talking about and we’re already getting some good ideas and feedback. And, as the planning folks interacted with the digital city model prototype in the CAVE this morning, they almost immediately began to come up with questions and ideas about how such a model could really be used. Nothing may come of it in the short term, but I really think that the ability to see these technologies working goes a long way toward helping the right people see how they really can be used.