Concept Development

-> Write a concept from a brief
-> create an understanding of the concept

User Profile....
-> demographics
-> Knowledge and experience
-> motivational differences
-> personal characteristics
-> physical characteristics

User Scenarios
THEMES
-> style reflects theme
-> create a mood board
-> make a theme visible
-> target emotions
-> look and feels

-> explore different contexts and environments to utilise the concept
-> 3D user interfaces for network management
-> explore the medium
-> purpose
-> emotional engagements
-> peoples emotional responses to working with a 3D environment

Literature Review

Over Christmas ( a time usually best spent drunk) we were given the first stage of the research project brief. Compose a review of literature based on your chosen topic was the general gist of it. This included previous research papers, journals books and other publications of any sort. With very little motivation I struggled through and manage to collect quite a large amount of data which would be very useful in suggesting an argument in the final paper. A lot of research is being done in different parts of the globe with regards 3D environments and interfaces. However, at the moment, from what I can see nobody is coming close to a suitable paradigm.

In the end, i think my lit review gave some interesting pro's and cons to 3D environments.

After a tutorial with Simon

After a very interesting tutorial with simon, i was reasured that i wasnt making a shambles of this project. My major problem at this point was what direction to take. I could decide what my final product or outcome would be. After several minutes of teasing idea, we came to the concept of representing a computer network in a 3D spatial environment for maintenance purposes. Simon suggested looking at Memory Palaces. This is the practice of mapping memory onto rooms imprinted on the mind. there is reference to it in the december archive of the course blog.

The second outcome of the tutorial was deciding what methods of primary research i was going to preform. We singled out the prime area of success in the 3D interactive industry and came to the conclusion of video games. From this i chose the recently popular "The Sims 2" game to investigate as part of my methadologies section.

Why am i picking 3D as my topic

Previous college education has a huge role in this. In my last college, CSN, we did projects that involved making 3D interiors, 3D Full motion sequences and 3D interactive games(using director). 3D Studio max became my favourite program in the world, and when combined with photoshop, it formed a power so unbeatable not even batman could stop it!! I found it lots of fun, so why not pursue a research topic in it i say!