Planning our Digital Places Sheet

Before learning how to create our own virtual places, we're going to take some time to think about what we want our digital places to do. Places 'invite' us to feel things and do things, and designed places are usually designed to invite us to do specific things.

What does a classroom during the school year usually invite you to do? What does it keep you from doing? What feelings does it encourage? What feelings does it discourage?

What about the place you're in right now? What about the digital places you explored earlier?

What about the place that you'll be making in these lessons?

Take a moment, either using the worksheet linked above, or your own paper, and develop an experience plan:

◉ Make a list of what you want visitors to your place to FEEL.

● Feelings can be emotions, but can also be lots of other things that happen in your body. You can feel dizzy, stable, or sick. You can feel like you have to squint to see, feel like you're safe, or feel like you have a long walk ahead of you.

● If it helps, reflect on some of the feelings you had in virtual places back in Part I. Were there any strong feelings you had there that you would like to try to create?

◉ Make a list of what you want visitors to your place to be able to DO

● Remember, this is about what actions your PLACE can encourage or discourage. So don't think about special abilities for you virtual body ("I want to fly," "I want to turn invisible"). Think about what your place can allow a body to do ("I want to walk on the surface of the sun," "I want to meet a three-headed monkey named Gary," "I want to sit down somewhere quiet").

◉ Next, write down HOW your place will encourage those activities and feelings. What artistic choices will you have to make? What things might you have to include?

◉ No more writing! Now, draw an "experience map" of what it will be like to move through your place. Imagine moving through your place. Are experiences close together or far apart? Are experiences intense, calm, or both? Do you have freedom to choose where you go, or is there one set path?

In the below tutorial, we'll explore the tools in SculptGL, a free online modeling tool that allows for different strengths and weaknesses than TinkerCAD. With SculptGL it is easier to make curved, organic, or irregular shapes. So we'll be using that for our terrain.

Tutorial: Introduction to SculptGL

Now that we're familiar with SculptGL's tools, we'll load in a flat surface, and use SculptGL to model and color our terrain. Think about your experience plan and sensory map from above - how can your environment contribute to those experience goals?

Tutorial: Sculpting & Exporting Terrain in SculptGL

Download the "flat_terrain.obj" starting model

Now we'll actually get to walk through our virtual world and get a feel for our terrain. Afterward, you may want to go back to SculptGL and revise your project - walking through a world can teach you new things about it! The tutorials below will show you how to make a personal copy of a template project, and begin to revise it into your own place.

"first_person_template project" on PlayCanvas

Tutorial: Bringing Your Terrain into a Digital Place

As you walk through your world, think about your experience goals:

• Is your world starting to create the feelings/behaviors you want it to?

• What changes will you need to make, either by editing your terrain, or adding more buildings/characters/objects, or by adding sound/light/other aspects of your scene, to better reach your goals?

Now that we have our terrain set, we can continue to build out our experiences by adding other elements to our places. These tutorials will walk through adding our earlier TinkerCAD models to our worlds.

(You can also make models in SculptGL and bring them in using the same steps as we did for our terrain above! The little froggy character in the image to the right was made in SculptGL.)

Tutorial: Adding an animated Mixamo figure

Tutorial: Adding a TinkerCAD structure

Tutorial: Adding a SculptGL structure