Blueprints for UU-NNA Virtual Campus

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Principles of Virtual Design

Although it is possible to form any sort of topology in virtual reality. I prefer is the design of virtual reality matches the behavior of "real space" as much as possible. The reason for this is that the reader is trying to form a picture of what is going on in their "mind's eye" and making things too different from what the reader is used has the potential for completely confusing the reader. At the same time, there should be some surprises to keep things from getting boring.

Another important principle is to make things easy to find, and to minimalize the number of steps that the user must take to get where he wants to go.

Other thoughts

One thing that is considerably different from most "real space" campuses is that everything is in one building. This is intentional. Part of the problem with "real space" campuses is that things are spread out all over the place. This leads to departments which are completely isolated from the rest of the university. By having the parts of UU-NNA spread out from a center agora, one will hopefully have cross-fertilization of ideas and prevent the compartmentization of knowledge that has occurred in modern universities.

Inspiration

The Inspiration for this architecture comes from various sources. If you are careful you will notice architectural allusions to the MIT main building, Grand Central Station, New York Stock Exchange, and the Palace Museum in Beijing.

Location

The proposed location of the UU-NNA virtual campus will be in the MediaMOO, north of the Media Lab.

General Outline

The Virtual Campus is designed to be a four story building. As one moves up in the university, one moves from "public" space to space that is more and more "private." Also, as one moves up in the university things become more structured and less free flowing. In the basement and first floor, that where the fun is at. In the second floor, you run into schedules, and in the third floor that's where the stuffed shirts are. Also as one move up, it becomes less "loud" and more "quiet." The shape of the university can be imagined as a upside-down U. In the center is the main lobby on the first floor and empty atriums on the second and third. As the university expands it will move outward. As you go outward, one moves from the general to the specific.

In the basement, there is the recreation area. This area should have hypertext links to chess, backgammon, and MUD servers. There may also be shops and marketplaces here.

In the first story there are the public areas. These are basically designed to be "information marketplaces" in which people go to the area they are interested in and listen in. The center of the first story is a Agora, where there may be art exhibits. From the agora, there are links to "school" lobbys which contain broad fields of knowledge such as "science," "art," "law," etc. Extending from the school lobbys are the department lobbys which contain more specific areas like "astronomy", "chemistry." From each of these departments there will be rooms for small discussions, exhibits, etc. From these lobbys there will be teleporters that will allow one to get to other parts of MediaMOO which are relevant to the subject in the lobby.

The Agora should be BIG, and should have lots of comfortable chairs to lounge around in. There should be enough room for something like "Speaker's Corner" in Hyde Park. By walking around the Central Plaza, one should be able to overhear random conversations about random topics. There should be interesting "robot performers".

The Agora should be enclosed, but should have the feeling of being in the park. Something should always be going on there.

Things that should be in the Agora are a hall of clocks and weather maps from throughout the world displaying the current time and weather conditions. Maybe we can also pipe in the latest news reports too. What about a newsstand filled with the latest electronic journals???

In the second story, there are classrooms and the lecture halls and the library. These can be reserved for certain times and places in a scheduling office located on the second floor.

In the third story, there are offices including the university administration offices. There is a balcony overlooking the "central plaza" and from the balcony extends northward the Adminstration. Someday there will be a protest here, and we will have to call the Campus Police 1/2 :-). From the Administration lobby, there are the offices of the university officers and the University Board Room. Elsewhere on the floor are offices of other people who want them.