UCSC V-World Tour- A Work in Progress
UCSC V-World Tour Team:
Director
- Bonnie DeVarco
Virtual Architects - Active Arts: Penny (Zg) & Craig (Aurac) Twining,
Henrik Gudbrandsen, Paul Klee
Student Builders & Documentors- Anita Roy Dobbs, Chad Rooney,
Kyla Sankey, C. Joel Durden
Digital Documentation & Multimedia - Virtual World Builders: Allan
Lundell & Marian McNamee
Technical Advisor - Bruce Damer/DigitalSpace
Education Technology Support - Jim Rintoul
Special thanks - to Circle of Fire/ActiveWorlds for generous support
of this project!
Special Thanks - to
Michael Thompson, Mark Cianca and Rachel Strauss,
without whom this project would never have been possible.
Introduction
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The UCSC V-World Tour Team has made remarkable progress in the first few weeks of the project. The students and digital videographers have poured through the slide archives of UCSC's Public Information Archives. They have spent hours up on campus carefully documenting each residential college with still cameras and digital video. Still images and digital frame grabs have been carefully placed up into storyboards on an expanding web site for virtual architects to use to base their architectures on. Pans of quad areas and landscapes of UCSC have been painstakingly created to get as many details, and views as possible. Maps of the campus have been collected, modified and developed from scratch so that builders and architects can arrange the colleges in the most efficient way and continually clarify the relationship of one group of buildings or objects to another. These maps will also give everyone a better sense of scale for the translation of the real campus into a virtual medium. Our team has already held a number of meetings inside the virtual worlds so our collaboration can continue smoothly with realtime communication across vast geographical distances. Our professional architects in England, Norway and Florida have already begun to build custom architectures for the students to build with once the UCSC World opens up and the ground is laid. Custom building a virtual world is not an exact science. But if the "world" alludes to and replicates the most distinctive qualities and characteristics of the real world, a true virtual campus will begin to emerge. This campus is definitely on its way. |
Ground Zero - The Cook House and Jitney Teleport Center
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| The most important thing to have in the entry point of the virtual UCSC World is the University of California sign which every student sees on her way into the campus. | In ground zero of the virtual world, a 3D version of the sign has been built, texture mapped with a photograph of the original sign. | |
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| Ground Zero - The Cook House and Jitney Teleport Center. The Cook House is a landmark of the UCSC campus. All campus tours begin here in the real world... | And in the Virtual UCSC world, the Cook House was the first building to be custom constructed by our virtual architects. | |
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| The rockface and wood panels are texture mapped using real photographs of the Cook House. Even the front door of rough hewn wood is photomapped onto the door of the virtual Cook House. | When the Cook House is moved to the UCSC world, landscape items will be added based on the real setting. A "Jitney Port" with UCSC shuttle buses will teleport visitors to each of the eight colleges. |
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| Finally, the interiors of the Cook House and each college will contain orientation materials for prospective students which link straight to UCSC's own online admissions information. Here is the interior of the Cook House with its stairway, windows, and railings. |