3D Scenes

 Making 3d objects in Adobe illustrator and mapping symbols onto them.

Skatedeck: The Takeover

Finally completed my official "The Takeover" skate deck.  The print didn't quite scale properly to fit exactly on the deck, but overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Full Throttle Poster Advertisement

This poster was a group collaboration I did with some classmates.  We were to make a new poster for a Coca-Cola product, and we chose to do Full Throttle energy drink.  

Credits for this poster goes to Arber Spaho, Laura Pinto, Henry Jubril, and Myself.

Virtual World - Second Life

In this post I will be reviewing the virtual environment world called "Second Life."  Second Life is pretty much an online world where users can socialize, customize their own avatar, and connect with other users.

Website Overview

My first thought for the Second Life website was that it was neat and organized.  Fonts and colors used were quite nice and suited each other, and they also did a good job highlighting the major buttons with a color that stood out from the rest of the site.  One tiny issue I personally had with the site was that they should make the client download button on the top of the screen rather than having it down at the bottom where most people would easily pass by it.  Moving on from what I disliked, the "What is Second Life?" tab I thought was unique of them to include videos of what Second Life was about, rather than have the users come on the site and just read a bunch of text, videos nowadays tend to get a lot more attention and circulate through the internet much quicker.  Personally I've played a number of MMORPG games, and have played numerous editions of "The Sims," so my first thoughts before going into this game was that it was going to be exactly like "The Sims" online with graphics that were probably going to be duller.

Avatar Creation

The avatar creation seems pretty cool, there are numerous things you can change within the avatar, some examples of them are, eye color, skin color, height, body fat, and clothing.  My first impression of the avatar creation was that to me it seemed a little hard to understand at first.  I found myself clicking around a lot even though I had read a bunch of how-to's, but after I figured out the avatar customization process, it was a lot easier to configure.  Tools within the customization are easy to configure, sliders are put in place to give users a range in which they can move sliders to configure their preferences.  When I finished making my avatar, I was happy with it, I didnt want to go overboard and spend hours making this look a certain way.  I checked out many different features, and then just made a simple guy wearing a pirate suit.  One thing I noticed about avatar customization was sometimes the avatar wouldn't change even when I changed its features many times.  I tried logging in and out, and waiting and still nothing changed.  At first I thought maybe it was just my computer I was working on, but when I tried another computer, the same thing happened.

There wasn't much that I disliked about avatar customization, other than the way the menu for the avatar was laid out.  I found it a little confusing, and thought maybe it could've been worked on a little bit more.  But other than that, avatar customization was pretty in-depth, and users could spend loads of time making their avatar.

Virtual Environment

Pictured above is my avatar in a virtual Toronto that I accidentally stumbled upon.  I clicked it as soon as I saw the word Toronto, and to my surprise it was done quite nice.  Being born and raised in Toronto, downtown Yonge-Dundas Square is actually a nicer looking part of our city, mainly because there are so many bright lights to look at.  There are a bunch of different destinations you can explore, more popular ones include ones that have the name "Club" in them.  Graphic wise, Second Life visuals aren't that bad for being a client you just open up and run on a pc, compared to games that have a heavy install.  At first I was expecting the visuals to be like Runescape (which I think sucks personally), but to my surprise, it turned out to look more like an online Sims game.  Animations were also okay to me, not mind-blowing, but again pretty good for something thats running on a client window.  

Interacting with your surroundings was pretty cool also.  There are a bunch of things you can play with, and also a huge number of things you can do with certain objects.  For example, sitting on a chair.  You can sit different ways, and aside from sitting in those different positions, you can actually choose exactly where you want to sit on a certain object due to an x and y coordinates you can manually adjust.  Because interactions are so in-depth, at times a user could easily be blindsided by the insane amount of things you can adjust, and I find that to be   somewhat a small issue other users may run into.  Aside from that, the environment looks great, and the amount of detail that goes into some of these surroundings are great also.

Communication

As far as socializing and communicating on the game goes, you can either chat by typing or chat by microphone and use your own voice.  In the picture above, I sat in on a conversation with some people who were using mics, and they were talking about some pretty interesting stuff.  One girl was actually a elementary school teacher who was talking about finding a job in Baltimore, Maryland, which I thought was insane just because they have one of the highest crime rates in America.  It seems as though these people were chatting like they were sitting at a cafe, and just talking about their lives, which surprised me because I thought most people who played this was just doing it to mess around with other people and trying spoil their time.  As far as meetings go, it would be cool to experience a meeting in a virtual world like this maybe once, just to get a feel of what its like, but doing it on a constant basis wouldn't be that great.  Again, even trying to attend a class like this would be a pretty cool idea the first time around, or even if this was an online course where your avatar would have to attend class.  But dont forget a lot more goes on in the real world, and sometimes the internet isn't as efficient as it seems.

Interface

In the picture above, you can see that the structure principle was used nicely.  The developers made any toolbars and buttons around the screen rather than having anything obstruct the center.  All the buttons and toolbars all have another menu that pops out once those buttons are clicked.  The contrast between the buttons and and fonts also are neatly done, making symbols and text that appear on buttons stand out on a darker background.

 

Pictured left, is an error message saying that I wasn't able to be teleported to the destination I wanted to go to.  This is a good example of the Feedback principle.  If I did not receive this error message, I would've been confused as to why my teleport wasn't able to go through, and I would've probably got mad and closed Second Life.  Feedback is key to the users.  Any application or game must provide feedback for their users to let them know whats going on in the case of an error, and let them know whats wrong.

The Visibility principle was another principle Second Life incorporated into there interface.  As you can see on the picture to the right, similar tasks are grouped together so users can find them more easily.  For example changing your avatar, customizing your clothes, and buying certain things, can all be found on the toolbar to the left of the screen, and also the main menu bar tasks are all grouped on the top left corner for users to access menu options all in one place. 

Overall Experience

To conclude my final thoughts on Second life, I'd like to say that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.  To me, I don't really see a point in playing a game like second life when we can live our own lives.  Not to bash on Second life, it is pretty cool to see all these environments being built for users just to hang out and explore, and to see the amount of work that go into designing all this, I do commend the developers and people who put work into this.  Its amazing to see how in-depth virtual environments can be, with its textures, and models, but Second Life could use a lot more developing and fine tunes.  My major issue with Second Life was that customizing my avatar was difficult just because every time I changed its features or clothes, they would change only sometimes, but didnt most of the time.  Avatar creation to me still feels a little buggy, and could be improved much more.  Would I ever use Second Life again? probably not, but if you're into online simulation games and are looking for a place to socialize through your computer and not in real life, Second Life is the perfect place to be.