Looking Glass Teleconference

This week we met with a class in New Jersey about Looking Glass. I really enjoyed the teleconference because it made some of the problems with Looking Glass very real. One of the problems that came out of the conference that we'll need to fix short term is the vocabulary we use to describe things. For example: challenge and bookmarks. The other thing I think the conference highlighted was the need for better integration between the community and the IDE. Currently, these two systems are integrated in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense for users. For example, if you want to find a world to remix in the IDE you must first go to the community and bookmark that world and then go back to the IDE. This really doesn't make sense for users and honestly it's a pain.

More long term, I think we need to rethink what the “ground” means in Looking Glass. This is a problem for many of our users that I see during user testing. If a character is standing on a object that isn't flat and it starts to walk it will just walk in thin air. We probably should make our animations respect “gravity” so that a character will just follow along whatever surface it's on.

Other than these issues I'm really glad to see so many middle school children successfully using our system. I really hope that we can fix some of these problems quickly because I would really like to start growing our community.