Philosophers world

This is a project about using principles from the ancient memory technique of Art of Memory to enchance the experience withing virtual environment settings for educational and amusement use. It is a project I started at CID (Center for User Oriented IT Design) together with my academic supervisor (in my final exam project in which this became a part) Anders Hedman.

It is a 3d world in which information regarding four filosophers and their ideas is placed. The information is placed together with imagery and artefacts that in various degrees relates to it, in accordance to ideas from the Art of Memory.

Some ideas regarding the spaciality in virtual environments is also played out. Four rooms are placed in every cardinal direction with a base platform tying them togehter. Also a torus shaped corridor is connecting them on the outer side. But this torus is radically different on the outside compared to the inside. The actual walkpath is made at least a factor ten shorter on the inside than what it appears from the outside. Also all differences in height and distance to the centerplatform is cancelled out and the corridor is symmetrical and level on the inside. Also the corridor cuts the corners of the mainrooms quite substansially, had this been a physical construction, but this is never revealed to the visitor.

In this project I modelled the environment in Maya and Photoshop. The gameengine was programmed from scratch using c++ and some classes for object loading and display from graphical toolkit wasa (programmed by coworker at cid)