Dear l garvie,

As an exhibit creator, I can tell you that designing exhibits about emotional topics are very unusual to find and very difficult to build. You have a winner.

Here are some comments to help you succeed:

1. It will be great if you can figured out security regarding to the trail mill. Children will have difficulties to "get into it" because their motor development is begining, one possibility is to use a manual one, your own steps moves the band.

2. In the Bata Shoe museum in Toronto, they have a display about famous people and their shoes, like Terry Fox, Princess Diana, Tiger Woods, Wiston Churchil. What about thinking some famous peolple too, who had accomplished something awesome for humanity?

3. Make a list of reallities that you want to "touch" or "invite" in your exhibit. I am Mexican, I've been in very poor places, I think that it will be great to take a tour in those places too.

Best regards,


Ampa

Ampa,
thanks... i will say much more about the kind of films that i hope the museum will want to try on the assets page, but in only 200 words i left the initial description at the physical structure of the thing.

good suggestion re children and the treadmill. i had thought of the problem and basically my solution is that a treadmill is not the only way to do this -- bikes, strollers w/runners, rock climbing walls, stair climbers etc can all accomplish the dual purpose of syncing the movements of the user with the movie while adding to the visitor's visceral experience.

yes, i like your last comment very much, and it has been foremost in my mind from the beginning. again, i will have more to say about this on the assets page, but (assuming they do decide to build it) i will ultimately leave the decision of just how much 'consciousness raising' should be attempted up to the smart folks at the tech. the one thing i hope to avoid is a cliched or obviously manipulative sort of effect. for example in the SL version of the exhibit, the film of a walk through grimy graffiti filled alleys to a N.Y. subway is triggered by selecting the shiny black leather shoes, while the scuffed up high top sneakers take the walker through a shady forest and into a sunlit meadow.

thank you so much for commenting. maybe you've seen my other project, Musical Chairs. it's more toy-like and much less introspective than this one, but very interactive.

best regards to you too,
garvie

Garvie,

I love your Musical Chairs, it has a lot of potential.

I have more questions for you:

What about a scooter? in the third world countries, scooters are not fancy, they are homemade too. I saw an exhibit in the ARS Electronica that solved the exploration of a virtual world this way. I have a photo, I will ask Avi Marquez how can I send it to you.

What about some places where there are no shoes at all? In the third world most of the people do not use shoes. Or they use other people's used shoes. Have you seen the movie Children from Heaven? Is a beautiful story about two siblings from the middle east that share the same pair of shoes. You MUST see it.

Keep on going...


Ampa

Ampa

thank you again for your comments. it's really very encouraging to log in and find that someone else is following the progress and making suggestions as well.

in reply: yes, a scooter would be a lovely idea. but i should maybe explain that i chose a treadmill for the SL prototype because it solves a number of design issues.

the design brief on this exhibit is to show the role of technology in film. i am trying to highlight 2 different, but related technologies -- prerecorded fim, and this fabulous new green screen technology, which does not need an actual green screen to isolate the image of a person and place her in a different setting. that said, the museum visitor won't actually be able to interact with the movie, because it is prerecorded. this means that users may have difficulty positioning themselves in relation to the scene in which they'll be inserted. because i want visitors to know 'what to do' as soon as they encounter the exhibit, and because i very much want them to feel that they are 'doing it right', and also 'looking good' while they're at it, the treadmill provides an instant solution to these two practical issues. it tells visitors where to be, what to do once there, and automatically makes sure that they're doing it right. it also, in a quite obvious way, fits with my chosen theme of WALKING a mile in another's shoes.

i chose the theme of walking in another's shoes because the exhibit is primarily about film as a medium. since film seems particularly able to give us a view of other places, a chain of events narrative, and also an intimate connection with another person, it seems the perfect medium in which to let visitors explore what's it's like to be someone else experiencing a different environment etc. now back to the treadmill..

one of the 'conceptual layers' (for lack of a better way to describe it) going on here is to render the metaphorical as the literal, and here the treadmill satisfies a few more different but related goals. using the treadmill provides a great way to sync the preloaded film of a person walking with the visitor actually walking, the visitors will be moving at the right cadence to actually FIT into the movie. also, since it takes about 15 minutes for an average person to walk a mile, that provides a nice outer boundary for how long the films and the visitors' experience should be. lastly, i think that the actual feeling (italics would be nice here) of themselves walking will greatly add to the visitors' visceral expereince of having been WALKING somewhere. for example, we;ve all seen those ultra realistic thrill films of Everest climbs and so on, but imagine how much more real it would feel if you were watching something like that suspended in front of the screen in a harness that could suddenly drop or raise you a few 100 metres. this is just walking, but the point is that the visitor will actually be walking. they won'y just see themselves walking, they will also feel themwsleves walking while watching it live. as for feelings...

i like that you right away got that this was an exhibit that hopes to elicit an 'emotional' response from the visitor -- it certainly does. but that said, i think that i should only go so far in trying to preordain what kind of emotions individual visitors will feel. as with all films and all art, the complexity or depth of the individual viewer's response depends on many factors... the depth and complexity of an individual's personality, experiences, learning, mood and so on. what each takes away from a film or installation depends largely on what each brings TO the piece. and if Walk A Mile was built in real life, it would be in a museum whose main visitors are children and teenagers. perhaps the more introspective or philosophic of these will somehow internalize the message that empathy is the better part of good judgment. but if others merely learn something about geography or culture, and still others merely delight in seeing themselves as the star of a trek through the Himalayas, that's fine with me. the goal is to give the visitor an enriching experience, but i prefer to leave the specific 'kind' of enrichment open-ended.

anyway, that's why i am concentrating on just the treadmill and films of walking for the prototype. it works on all the levels that i want it to work on. and i suppose that's what i meant about my not trying to make it too manipulative or too obviously intended as an exercise in consciousness-raising. of course it would be wonderful if everyone walked away with a greater understanding of the human condition, and greater empathy for fellow human beings, but no art can actually MAKE that happen. i think of art as a sort of portal that can open a heart to change, but the change itself must be internal and unique to the individual.

last bits:
yes, i saw Children from Heaven, and yes, i agree that it was beautiful. yes, of course try to get to me through Avi, but even better, you can always IM me in second life, and if you haven't been there yet, you really should go!!!

and thank you again for your ongoing interest. i just scanned back over this thinking that i might cut out most of the verbiage before saving and sending this, but i realize that the exercise was a good chance to articulate the thought process that went into this design. so, even though it seems as though i say, 'no thanks' to all your suggestions and questions, they're really very helpful, so please,keep asking.

also, i'm putting some pictures of the sl prototype on the assets page today, so go have a look.

best,
garvie

Dear Garvie,

Thank you for your "verbiage" it is helpful for you to complete your ideas and share themm with me to understand the purpose of your exhibit.

I totally agree with you that the interaction with the exhibit should be very intuitive for the visitor.

A visitor spends a period of 4 hours in a Museum like the Tech, because of it size and number of exhibits. 15 minutes is a lot of time for just one exhibit. In my experience doing research regarding to exhibit performance, visitors spend 1 to 5 min in an exhibit. Of course there are children that are interacting with exhibits for a greater span of time, but there are other visitors waiting for their turn.

I saw you in last Friday meeting at The Tech at SL, I am Lorenza Rockocoko.

Let's make a deal, work this week with this great idea, in order to discuss next week your updates. Sounds like a plan?

Wishing you the best,


Ampa
Lorenza Rockocoko

Ampa

ok, you clearly know more about this than me. i hadn't realized that 15 minutes would be a long time for most people to spend on an exhibit. but i did know that it would be a too long time for some, so the proposed plan is to just let them hop off at any time and have the treadmill and exhibit reset itself, waiting for the next user. i was thinking that if someone did walk the whole mile, there ought to be some sort of a 'reward' such as seeing the image of the person whose walk it was, or having the camera angle zoom out to an extreme distance in a sort of google earth effect to show the visitor where on the globe their simulated walk had taken place.
it was also planned that there ought to be a behind the scenes component so that people could go 'backstage', see how the green screen works,actually learn something about the technology, and perhaps watch other visitors walking. maybe, if that didn't spoil the 'magic' too much, that would be something to consider for those waiting their turn.hmmm

as for the development, it's pretty much built. i am going in world to make the last movie in a few minutes. then i have some audio components to fiddle with, and the plan is to install the exhibit at Parkside Hall later tonight. so after tomorrow's meeting, you can actually test the thing out and tell me more of what you think.

again, thank you so much for these past couple days of comments. it really has helped me to verbalize the plan. :-)

see you soon in SL
garvie

Garvie,

The backstage tour, could be in the museography aids, people walk in the treadmill, then the go to explore more, while other users are walking, engagement will be longer with a lot of content.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to make it for tomorrow's meeting, I'm packed with my job. But, I'll do my best.

Thank you for this dialogue,


Ampa

Ampa

hi again. well, not only do you know more about this than i do, but 'museography aids' is definitely new to my lexicon. and in keeping with the, just when you think you know everything theme, i ran into several problems during the installation last night. turns out that the design is a little too faithful to the real life plan in some ways and not faithful enough in other ways. on the unfaithful side, the cameras look more like lights (darned emanating beams)... Aristotle would think that explained things, but avatars just find it hard to navigate through them. on too faithful side, it's very awkward for an avatar to SEE the buttons on the control panel. as you know, SL's default is for us to see ourselves from behind, so once on the treadmill, avatars are in the way of what they're supposed to do next. anyway, i made some adjustments and i guess i have to make some more today.
back to the museography aids... yes, i would think that this exhibit could be very content rich and educational in a number of ways. the experience itself is just a chance to for visitors to themselves placed in a different setting and context, but later they might be very curious about the technology to do just that, comparative geography or culture or maybe even the concept of judging people and the role that empathy ought to play.

anyway, that's all for now. i am wrestling with whether the SL prototype relies too heavily on avatar curiosity and initiative, or whether i need to put up a bunch of signs that explain the concept or tell people how to make the exhibit work. any thoughts?
(sigh)
later,
garvie

Dear Garvie,

Cheer up, you have a great idea. I totally respect you, because I don't know nothing about building in SL, and you are a champ.

In SL you can solve your challenges this way:

Don't worry about the look of the camera, focus on the film, that is the magnet to your exhibit. Think about attracting peoople through the images.

For people that learn through listening the film should have music or sound.

The control panel could be at a side, so avatars could see and "touch" it.

Too many labels.... boring..., instead, think on a phrase, that could be a banner, a nice and appealing banner, with a catchy phrase invinting to interact.

Your museography aids could be screens on the sides with the making of.

You are very very close to reach your goal. Remember, visitors in museums have a free choice of interaction, exhibits are magnets...


Best regards,


Ampa

Hello again Ampa

when i didn't see you at the design meeting, i suspected that you'd be 'here' instead, and full of helpful suggestions. i'm flattered that you think of me as a great builder, but from what i've seen in SL, i think of myself as an absolute beginner. it helps that i could draw and paint prior to this in ways that would take an essay to explain, but i have only just started to learn what's possible in SL building, i am still trying to learn the differences between rings, tubes and toruses etc.

some replies...

cameras: yes, the cameras seem stranger all the time, and my justification for including them is starting to seem illogical. they are there and very prominently so because they are an integral part of how this exhibit would work in real life, and this exhibit is afterall, a prototype. buuut since the cameras would be invisible in real life, it's difficult to say that it's important that they're there 'because' this is a prototype. the answer is somewhere between the fact that realism isn't always best achieved by imitating reality and the fact that a prototype is part schematic and part artist's rendering. at least that's the best justification i can offer now. aesthetically they are also a nice burst of green diagonals against an otherwise austere and very black background. but my new experiment will be to script the textures to flicker movie projector style to see if that (and the unconscious process of free association) will make them appear more like cameras running than lights shining on the scene.

film:
cameras again, i did change a portion of the camera mounted above the screen into a light, which makes the pictures appear much brighter. :)

sound:
there is sound. there is no way to actually sync an ambient track with one of these little fake movies, and although i could attach sounds to each texture change as an event, it would get kind of noisy. plus, since my other one, Musical Chairs is already the noisiest and most obnoxious exhibit in the hall, i thought that i would give people a break. so the sound in this exhibit is merely a loop of footsteps walking steadily, which is cued by the avatar's using the treadmill poseball. this is interspersed with very occasional ambient sounds like a twig snapping or a distant sparrow. in the real life version however, the overall effect could be much improved by each film having a full soundscape to accompany it.

control pamel:
problems, problems... basically the solution was to make it twice the size that it was and i also altered the angle so that it is perpendicular to the treadmill. it is impossible not to SEE it now. i also added a 'touch here' hover text script and did some things to make the buttons stand out a bit more. it looks better now as well, so no worries there. i hope that's enough to make the controls easier to use.
i too considered placing them some place else, top or bottom of the screen and so on, but discounted this to avoid having avatars clicking and thinking that they didn't work when nothing happened. in this exhibit nothing 'happens' until an avatra walks on the treadmill. so for now i feel that i have to leave the controls at the front of the treadmill because they have to come after the poseball, and because there simply is no movie without the treadmill.

besises, i have to admit that there really isn't much that would make this exhibit a good interactive experience in SL, short of hotlinking it to a movie on you tube. i will be satisfied if the SL version of Walk A Mile is just good enough to show how great the RL version could be. in contrast, Musical Chairs works in both, though it also makes tradeoffs in both. In SL the chairs are really funky and the stage allows for lots of movement and randomness. In the RL version much of that will be traded off for much (much much) better music and much greater control for the visitor. Walk A Mile in SL alas, can only suggest what would be possible in RL. i managed to sync the treadmill with the the 'movies' and sound, but they most certainly are NOT real movies, and there aren't any cameras that can actually capture the avatra walking, nevermind that green screening a captured image is way beyond what lsl can do. i could fake my avatar green screened in photoshop and then make that into a fake film, i could even overlay it using alpha textures, and i thought of it doing it. the reason that i decided against it is because it would seemingly defeat the purpose of showing the prototype as an interactive exhibit.... unless the point was to walk a mile in garvie garzo's shoes, which it most certainly is not.

labels:
i know what you mean! i cringed when i put up the signage this morning. i mean, i lived through the 70's art gallery experience when it would take all of 0.3 seconds to see that you were standing in front of 4 square feet of canvas painted plain white, but a further 30 minutes and a pocket dictionary to read the cards that explained WHY this was the case.
in my defence on this one, i assure you that the signage is on an outside wall of the exhibit booth,very subtle and offers only enough details to explain how the prototype would function in real life. it does not delve into the theory behind it or tell people what they should notice or think about it.
as for inviting, instead of a sign with the exhibit's title, i used a welcome mat on the floor that says "invites" visitors to "walk a mile".

museography aids:
oh how that just rolls off my tongue now :P - yes, i would love to do my own behind the scenes part of the exhibit to show how everything works... but each exhibit at The Tech in SL fits in to a 10 X 10 space. further, since i don't know the first thing about green screen technology, i'm not sure what i'd put in there.
as for a behind the scenes on the SL Walk A Mile, this email exchange between us and my daily diary of snapshots on the assets page are serving admirably.

btw
i keep getting these emails from the tech saying that i should read my new comment, reply to it and then REMOVE it. but i don't know why i'd do that. i feel as though you and i have established an informal collaborative blog.
good for us!

thanks again
garvie

Ampa
(good grief, now i'm replying to my own comments, no wonder they keep asking me to remove them)

scratch that last thing i said about accepting that Walk A Mile just couldn't be a good interaction in SL and there being no way to replicate green screening in SL. back at Parkside I realized that SL can actually DO what green screening can only pretend to do. i can actually make the treadmill itself VANISH... and if all the walls and the floor were on matching timed textures, then after setting the thing going, the avatar really would seem to be walking through a whole other location, though in reality still grinding away on a now invisible treadmill.
i don't know if i can get that many prims linked to timed event llsetalpha... and i probably am not good enough as an SL photographer to actually get 120 perfectly alligned snapshots for each movie, but at least it IS POSSIBLE... and it might make a really cool SL exhibit. you go into a little black box, walk on a poseball, select a picture and voila, the walls come alive with pictures and sound, and you are walking in the forest.... or whatever.
for now i will just work on making the treadmill disappear, and that will suffice as a metaphor for green screening in the real life version. it's starting to sound less like a prototype...

cheers
garvie

I just want to say how awesome it is to see this continuing dialog about this exhibit. I think that this exchange really reveals both the complications of using SL to prototype for RL (since so many elements don't translate perfectly) and the benefits of working things out with others :)

From my perspective, creating something in SL that clearly conveys the concept in RL is most important. Garvie, I presented an image of this exhibit at a museum conference on Saturday and was able to explain in one sentence the exhibit concept--and the participants could really "see" what the exhibit would be like based on the quickie snapshot. That, to me, means a successful use of SL... whether or not it becomes an RL exhibit.

And Amparo is right that the average visitor uses an exhibit here for 1-3 minutes, which will definitely impact the experience. My guess with something like this is that many people, esp kids, would want to change shoes, possibly pretty rapidly, to see what the outcome is for each set. I think you would have to establish a narrative pretty aggressively to keep people locked into one scene.

There's also a funny hidden benefit of this exhibit: promoting exercise! :)

Hi Nina, Ampa if you're still listening

well, first off some updates on my over-ambitious scripting as laid out in the 'never surrender' comment. i did make the camera beams disappear and only reappear with the use of the treadmill, and that was semi-successful. truthfully they weren't noticeable enough with the 'film' running. making the treadmill disappear however was an unmitigated disaster,( well ok, maybe just a big boo boo). it disappeared all right... for good, and then only came back in pieces, not whole pieces mind you, just surfaces of pieces, then i somehow shot the whole exhibit booth into the sky (note to avi, if you see some bits of booth hovering somewhere above The Tech in SL, please destroy or return as you see fit). needless to say, for now as to scripting objects to auto-cloak, i surrender. (!)

replies to Nina:
yes, the dialog has been really helpful in a number of ways. it especially helps to clarify my thinking about the point of the exhibit and this in turn helps me check for places where i may have gone off track. plus, Ampa has given me a number of good ideas and pointers, and now you have added a couple as well.

yes, i agree that SL is a fabulous way to prototype exhibits. am SL build conveys so much more information than a written description or sketch can do, so it requires less imagination for others to visual your idea. and, it's actually much faster and easier and therefore cheaper than a high quality artist's rendering. plus, there simply is no better way to get the 'feel' of a space than to actually walk in and aroiund it, which avatars can do.
so i am very glad that the wee snapshot of the build worked so well with a nonSL audience.

as for the ultimate design of a RL version and the length of films and so on, maybe we rename it "walk a minute" (lol) or "walk with me" using films of one person walking with room for a RL partner to be added. the length of time on the treadmill should definitely be left up to the visitor, and i suppose it wouldn't be too hard to let them switch shoes mid-walk. assuming that the videos are all there waiting to be played, it might not take much longer than changing channels with a small delay for the compositing to take effect.

a note on that... i have been looking into digital compositing, to take up Ampa's suggestion for museography aids to accompany the exhibit, and the kind of cameras that can do the recording and compositing all at once are available, but it might be rather expensive and rather technical to have the visitor watching the composite movie at the same time. So maybe the exhibit would function best with a small amount of time spent on the treadmill in front of the green screen and more time spent backstage putting the composite togther and seeing how the technology works.

in the SL version each walk film lasts only 90 secs, but of course there is no way for avatars to see themselves walking in the scene so it's difficult to gage whether this would make a longer walk seem worthwhile.
also, i will be adding my 'how to' on digital compositing to the outside of the booth shortly, and while i doubt that this will add much of a wow factor in SL, perhaps in RL learning how to make your own composites would be even more fun than seeing yourself in one. you might send kids home to try to insert themselves 'Forest Gump style' into their parents' wedding videos and so on.

as you said, things don't translate perfectly between SL and RL. but at least it's not all a case of things being lost in translation; some things can be gained as well.
for now, the SL Walk A Mile stays more or less as is since it encapsulates so many aspects of film compositing. in one setting visitors can see digital compositing in action, learn how it's done and star in one all at the same time.

and yeah, exercise is a bonus. i should have spent HALF as much time on a RL treadmill as i have on this one in the past couple weeks.

thanks for commenting, and for all your encouragement
garvie