Building in Second Life
Second Life is built by its users using primitives, or "prims" - small 3d objects (up to 10m) that are from either extruding or rotating preset 2D shapes, like triangle, trapizoid or ellipsis.
Each face of the 3D shape can then be assigned a color and a texture.
The object can also be set to be affected by physics, to flop, or to become a light source.
"Scripts" that react to events can be used to add behaviour to objects.
Types of users and goals
Second Life has lots of users.
By activity/goal
large-scale builder (simulator-sized)
terraformer
small-scale builder (chairs, furnitures, etc.)
avatar/accessories builder (heavy on prim manipulation)
landowner
scripter
customizer
By expertise
3d pros
other kinds of pros (e.g. musicians)
execs who (rightly or falsely) believe that SL will save meeting expenses and is the next greatest thing
furries (and other
counter-culture deculture alternative culture leisure users)
eveyone is 18+.
Tasks
Existing tasks -- don't break any
View or edit name/desc
View owners
Edit perms/sale info/etc
Assign behaviour -- something only needs to be done once (hopefully)
click behaviour
Physical, temp, phantom
locked
Select prims or sets
Edit params -
pos, rot, size - rather important and well-covered
prim manipulation on path: - everyone but Jill
path cut/dimple
skew
hole size Y
radius, revolutions
on profile:
hole , hole size
hollow size, type
profile cut
Hole size X
combo:
shear
taper
Texturing
rotate, zoom, offset
set as Flexible, light source
scripting and editing contents
Terraforming - a distinct goal with normal building but lumped together currently nevertheless
Wishlist - from interview
alignment, distribute <-- highly wanted
reflection/symmetry <- hard to do
hierachical linking <- needs server support
texture gizmos
select a part of the texture to apply to face <- how?
UV unwrap
more bump maps
Personae
Ellen Primswitch
Ellen's avatar dresses rather like how you would expect an enterprenuer to dress, but at the same time her large, purple ponytail hair and blinging silvery pendant with a moon-and-star design gives a otherworldly feeling.
As the founder of M&P Metaverse Solutions, she creates Second Life presence for real-world brands like Abra-Cola and Mochisoft.
She has a few years of experience with professional 3d packages, and is sometimes frustrated at the platform's limitations. Still, her clients are always satisified, and even sometimes awed, by her designs of whole 256m*256m islands.
When she's not building, she sometimes attend live music concerts in Second Life.
Zaneth Snowpaw
Zaneth is a "furry" - that is, his avatar is an anthropomorphic animal. A toony arctic fox that wear shorts, is a bit timid and loves cake, to be exact.
He sometimes draw cartoon critters.
In second life he makes avatars and accessories and sometimes sell them under the PawPaw AvatarZ brand. He built and scripted the vending machine too.
When he's not building, he hangs out with other furries and attends roleplay sessions.
In real life, Zaneth is a 2nd-year university student in a computer science program.
Jill Laurent
Jill's avatar dresses casually in t-shirt and jeans, and looks like he's in his late 20s. He bought his jet black short hair, belt and running shoes from other users (who built them using primitives), though he had to fit them himself. A pair of cross-shaped charms hang from his belt.
He builds for amusement. Sometimes he would attend building competitions. He likes the challenge of recreating things in primitives in a time limit.
In real life, he's a mid-level manager for a small international company. He has only been using Second Life for two months, but he is already interested in the possibility to use Second Life for weekly meetings.
Why are there three personae
Least personae to cover the most use cases
One for each "user level": Ellen is "professional", Zaneth is "hobbyist", Jill is "Casual".
Conceptual Design
Interaction style: direct manipulation in combination of form fill-out
The current interaction style is mostly form-fill-out with a bit of direct manipulation. Many operations can only be done from numerical entrys, some of them not accessible from the interface at all.
Since a lot of those operations normally would have the user looking at the 3D object after change anyway, using direct manipulation can speed them up. At the same time some operations are still more convinent with form fill-in.
Some advanced options will be menu-based.
Concept: A part of Second Life client interface, for creating and manipulating primitives in Second Life. To users, this would be a "mode" that is switched into. (Better make that more explicit)
Users: About all users of Second Life would be interacting with this for at least a bit, so it's important that the interface is discoverable and learnable. But it's mostly geared towards people who do this a lot.
Objective: provide direct interaction methods to minimize user madness from mismatched mental models. Increase effeciency. Include new functionalities.
Objects: Prim, texture, script, camera
Problems with the current build system
*icons do not have suffecient contrast and identifiable sihouette. Either it's grey on grey or blue on blue.
*professionals are used to working with mesh or NURBS, but not expecting primitives based on extruding/lathing (mental model disconnection)
*hands-off apporach with lots of text boxes, but no sense of their meaning and/or valid ranges (complexity, mental model disconnection)
*textboxes hard to hit
*lacks many tools. alignment tools is a biggie! (functionality)
*superflorious tools (camera, lifting)
*some things are better left hidden
* needs other camera tools (roll, preset angles)
*HUEG amounts of artificial limits (object size, script delay/memory limit, bad LoD, etc.) making builders angry people!
Physical Design
Implement with C++/OpenGL as this is what the Open Source client uses
Colors and Icons: use guidelines from Tango icon project (
http://tango.freedesktop.org/)
GUI components: use existing
Appendix:Interview
The first interview is with the User Experience Interest Group - about 4-5 people, who are interested in UI design and usability. Some are real-world designers using CAD software or CAD software designers. Others are client developers.
Questions asked including their opinion towards the current build interface, most wanted feature, existing workflow.
Also asked two other avatars about opinions.
SL Build UI