Final Project Proposals

Next week you need to turn in a proposal for your final project in this course. Here are some guidelines and suggestions to help you approach this rather important task.

I. Words to Live By

"In simulation, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer clearly points to a thing that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through virtual space." (Sherry Turkle)

II. Requirements for the Project

1. It must incorporate some VR or 3-D imaging technology. The obvious choices are photographic QuickTimeVR or QTVR/Bryce, but you may substitute a different 3D/VR package, with my permission, and if you dare.
   
   
2. It must be extensive. If you are using panoramas, you must build a linked system with a minimum of six movies. If you decide to work with static viewpoints as in Myst-style pseudo-VR, you must create a space with at least 12 major viewpoints.
   
   
3. It must be substantial. Forget postmodern depthlessness for the moment -- this project must have some connection to a distinct set of ideas or associations in which its audience (the class) can be expected to take some interest. See Part IV below for suggestions.
   
   
4. The project must include two content streams, one of which is not 3D or VR. The simplest way to satisfy this requirement is to work in HTML frames, using links from the VR frame as indices to verbal or graphic material in a second frame. You are free, of course, to invent other solutions. However you approach this problem, your project must develop some useful and intelligible relationship between elements in the virtual world and elements in the parallel body of text. This takes major thinking!
   
   
5. There must be an element of originality or distinctiveness. Try to demonstrate that your project could not have been done without its virtual-space element; or explain in your proposal what unique attribute virtual-space graphics will add. Alternatively, explain how you intend to reinterpret or rework existing conventions of virtual representation.

III. Requirements for the Proposal

The proposal should be approximately 500 words and may include sketches, thumbnails, and/or diagrams. It should indicate how you will meet each of the four criteria above. Please be specific about both interface design (what is visible to the user) and information design (the invisible structure, or network of relations that underlies what we see).

IV. Some Suggestions

1. A memory palace. In the classical and Renaissance worlds, orators learned to memorize long speeches or bodies of information by visualizing places or built structures. Create a virtual world that indexes some crucial set of your own memories or a compelling set of documents. See Christopher Keep's comments on Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse in this week's reading, or see the "Writer's Brain" section of the Funhouse itself. (Funhouse is loaded on the iMac in the Hypermedia Room.)
   
   
2. A narrative. Use a virtual world as index and interface for some sort of multi-perspective or multi-dimensional story. It's been done before but can certainly be done again, and better. For something to aim at, see raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/rl.
   
   
3. A reading of the readings. Look through some or all of the assigned readings and extract a collection of passages, or perhaps paraphrases. Add to this collection some commentary of your own to provide continuity or coherence. Add a system of cross-links and you have the makings of a (verbal) hypertext. Deploy this hypertext in a virtual environment in some way that illuminates or transforms the material.
   
   
4. An essay on virtual space, or on the rhetoric of virtual space. Build a world that embodies and exemplifes both good and bad qualities of the encounter between concepts and 3D graphics. The challenge in this project is to create a structure that can be understood without the default sequentiality of prose discourse.

V. Formalities

The project is due Wednesday, December 15 at 8:15 PM. Please do not stretch or miss this deadline. Upload all component files for your project to a subfolder called final within your personal folder on Cow.

You are responsible for checking the effectiveness of your project. Broken links, dysfunctional movies, and other technical errors will count against your grade. The reference platform for this project is a Windows NT PC running Internet Explorer 5.x with QuickTime 4 and CosmoWorlds 2.1 plugins. I.e., if your project runs in Explorer on any of the six newer PCs in the Hypermedia Room, you are fine.