EightyDays Project

Prezi of my project

Test on Prezi

Final survey and results

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PDNVCN8

Problems, glitches, solutions....

The build itself has been going well but there have been a few frustrating points.

I created all the 'suspect' prims in the sandbox and had created Voki media for each which would stream to each prim. The Voki media cannot be saved anywhere or downloaded from site itself. This causes no problem in the sandbox. When we moved to Hudson Valley, I set out all the Voki streaming prims but my avatar was virtually uncontrollable. The graphics became clunky, movement was delayed and disjointed and chat was out of sync. Alan came to give me some advice and we experimented with switching off the media; everything went back to normal when I did this. We therefore concluded that the voki files are too large to be streamed into SL.

This was a major setback as the whole idea of 'flow' (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) depends on being 'in-world', in context and immersed. 

I started to look at other software available for text-to-speech audio files but none of them were of good enough quality. They also didn't have a choices of male/ female or a range of accents. Given the time constraints at this point I had to find a solution fast; had I been able to set out all the Voki prims earlier, I would have had time to make audio recordings using different people or even as Maureen suggested, film different people and then use these files on the prims themselves. However, as we moved to Hudson Valley quite late in terms of testing and delivery, the only option available to me was to link the Voki media to the prim and for the user to access it on a browser outside SL. This will obviously have an effect on 'flow' and immersion.

I also found that I was placing too much in too small an area in terms of graphics. I spent an entire afternoon placing 'mud' and trees into a small area of space. However, it was then really difficult to navigate through this area as leaves kept getting in the way of the view of the suspects and orientation was hard - in short, the small was too small. As Maureen suggested, my build needed to be broader and more open plan, less like a 'doll house' which will constrain users.