Thekla and RetroYou
These are two virtual environments created for my Expressive Virtual Space class with Michael Nitsche in Fall 2007. Both were modeled in Maya and use the Blender 3d game engine. Windows executables are included here, but I make no guarantees that they will work for anyone else—the blender game engine can be a little buggy.
Thekla
Thekla is a city in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The city is forever under construction so that its destruction cannot begin, and the residents say that the blueprint for the city is the stars. I have modeled an illustration of my interpretation of the city in Maya and made it explorable in the Blender 3d game engine. All of the buildings in the city are made entirely of ibeams and wooden planks and surrounded by temporary scaffolding. The evening sky appears above, and there is a sound of hammering in the background.
To explore the city, use the arrows to move about and the page up and page down keys to look up and down.
RetroYou
RetroYou is an exploration of one of the ways a player's real body might be brought closer to the virtual body in a virtual environment. The player can explore the virtual environment in first-person view. The player will encounter mirrors in the virtual environment that "reflect" the player's real body in front of a reflection of whatever the virtual body is standing in front of. This image comes from a live webcam feed of the player, which is reversed the way a real reflection would be.
The environment that the player is placed in consists of four rooms, each with trompe l'oeil cutouts of a screenshot from an old game. Mario, Doom, Alone in the Dark, and King's Quest are represented; the Mario room was created by me, the others were created by other group members.
There is one place in each room where the player's virtual body can be where the reflection of all the cutouts line up to make up the original screenshot with the player's body reflected in front of the scene. This places the real body in the context of several different virtual environments. The overall effect is supposed to be like being in a museum or an amusement park of the games.
To explore the environment, use the arrows to rotate, WASD keys to move, and page up and page down to move up and down. It works best with a webcam, but if you don't have one then your "reflection" will show up as a big X inside a circle.