Art Center College of Design |
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Project Coordinator
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Project Description Our plan for ACCD world in the AWEDU is to build an environment that continues our AW "accd" world design but that pitches the world's tonality in a brighter key. This sibling world will provide a double look at our design strategy. Two examples will be better than one, and we can test our ideas in a new context. | ||
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Project Coordinator
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Project Description Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, offered its first accredited course in online virtual worlds design in 1998. Each term (three trimesters / year) since 1998, the virtual worlds design class, led by Dr. Michael Heim, has focused on designing and building in ActiveWorlds. The class began with small enrollments (sometimes as few as 2 students) and has grown (currently 8 students). Because student skills have continued to grow, the ACCD world begun in 1998 has reached a certain fullness, and the new class of world-building students is looking for the challenge of designing a new space. The stable ACCD world environment in AWEDU is now serving another purpose than building fresh objects. ACCD world offers a primary location for hosting the series "CyberForum@ArtCenter" developed by students in the Virtual Worlds Theory class (a companion course to the Virtual Worlds Design class which enrolls different students who come from the Theory and Critical Writing Program at Art Center). The second space, "VWD" world -- "Virtual Worlds Design / 3D Web" -- belongs to the design class and has evolved to become a second example of the design approach developed by the theory students. While ACCD world was constructed a floating design in a minor key - somber colors with black background -- the VWD world carries out the floating design in bright, light colors and cheery models. During the second half of 2000, VWD world served as the space for "avatecture" experiments, which conjoined virtual with physical spaces. An article in the January 2001 issue of Computer Graphics World ("The Feng Shui of Virtual Worlds") describes those experiments and shows several screenshots taken from the CyberForum events in AWEDU. During the month of April 2001, the Digital Cultures Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara will study VWD and ACCD worlds as samples of virtual worlds design and as environments for the CyberForum@ArtCenter. See an online version of the article from Computer Graphics World at: http://www.mheim.com/html/articles.htm For the UC Santa Barbara project, see: http://dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu/research.html | ||
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