Passing Off Google Eath to Tony

All of the broken links in GE have been fixed. Sometimes the tours work, other times I still get jettisoned. It still crashes a lot more than I think it should on my machine, but seems to not act up as much on Tony's. I still don't feel there is enough interaction, and I should probably edit some more video to add into the experience. But it's difficult to want to add more to GE El Cerrito when I know that this is going to be a much better experience in Second Life. As a proof of concept, I believe we have enough for the Google Earth portion of this project now, and I am going to start working on the Second Life portion of this. As I begin to add additional video and interactivity in SL, I will also add it to the KMZ file for Google Earth when possible. That being said, somebody should go back and check my work to make sure that my lack of knowledge is not what is limiting the GE experience. For instance, did I model the buildings efficiently enough so that they would look good but not take up so much memory? Could I have written better code for the info balloons? Etc.

So, I have passed off this part of the project to Tony. He is more of a coder than I am (although not very familiar with Google Earth and kmz or kml), and I think he will be able to look at the code and fix some of the things that have been bugging me. I leave Google Earth El Cerrito in his hands. Now I am ready to concentrate on the Second Life build.

Still Tying Up Loose Ends in Google Earth

I have been spending time trying to wrap up the Google Earth portion of this project. I moved all of the media assets to the live server so that the links would not break every time a DNS change is made on the server I was using.

As I work with the Google Earth version of the project, I find that GE is just not as intuitive as Second Life. While coding the KML (KMZ) files is not difficult to figure out using the GE Community reference guide, it is also fairly limiting. (IE You can only stream video from YouTube in the info balloons, which limits you to short videos. Videos longer than 10 minutes must be assigned a web link and open in a browser outside of GE. I am starting to wonder if I should trash what I already have and start anew because I used a demo version of sketch-up to create the buildings, and I think maybe they are so big (file-size) that they are causing problems when they load. Navigability is difficult, limited and frustrating at times, and something about the terrain sometimes causes "camera bumps" and the user gets jettisoned out into space and becomes "lost". The "hard-coding" of pre-determined navigation is more difficult than the other areas of coding, and it may be beyond my ability at this time. On top of everything else, Google Earth crashes a lot, and is not a very stable environment. (Although that might be the antiquity of my machine!)

Plan of Action

My plan of attack for this project is as follows:

1. Finish up the Google Earth experiment. THere are broken links that need to be fixed. There should be more video to look at, and the explore links should be researched more to see if there are better links out there. I would also like to figure out a way to make it more easily navigable, so that people understand how to interact with the media. The strength of this type of experience in Google Earth is that the user can experience EL Cerrito as a part of the rest of the world. Comparisons and contrasts can be made with other areas of the world.
   
2. Begin modeling EL Cerrito in Second Life. I believe that this will be a much better experience for the user. The navigability is much easier, there are more opportunities for interaction with the sim, and the users will also be able to interact with each other. The weakness of this type of experience in Second Life will be that El Cerrito will exist as a microcosm, unconnected with what actually surrounds it geographically in reality. It will also be time-consuming to build things that we need to include to make this sim appear to be El Cerrito.
3. At a later date Emin will also be modeling EL Cerrito in Unity 3-D, which can be used with a web client. The strength of this type of experience using Unity will probably be that you get everything you get with Second Life, but only a web browser is needed for the user to interact.
   
4. We will keep notes during the builds and do field tests with users to compare and contrast the experiences using each one of these mediums. We shall write a research paper about the project. At the end, the geography department (as well as other departments) should have 3 simulated field school experiences available for students to use.
   

the El Cerrito Project

This overall mission of this project is to recreate El Cerrito (a much-studied Spanish village in New Mexico) using three different approaches. These approaches include Google Earth, Second Life, and Unity 3-D. The major goal for all three technologies is to create an immersive, interactive environment giving students a "field-school" experience without ever leaving their desk.

This blog will concentrate on my experiences of building El Cerrito in Second Life. While I am not a stranger to the Second Life environment, I do have very limited skills going into this project. I am not a graphic designer, an artist, an architect or a coder. I have more of a "jack of all trades" skills set. I started this project in Google Earth, and I am curious how the two experiences will compare.