Week 5 (6/22 - 6/28)

As we approach the end of this week, what I am hoping to do is finalize the remix visualization. I think the best plan of action to encourage viewing the remix visualization is a combination of integrating the visualization with the world show page, as well as, have a separate page that gives a more detailed connection of remixes. Having the information on the show page will give users the opportunity to see what remixes can do, while having the connection page will gives more experienced users the data they need to learn about the changes in the animation from the originals.

Friday, I spent finishing up the new visualization of a remix to make it more useable from a user's perspective (see Remix Visualization from last week). I decided to move away from a more linear timeline because it does not describe as accurately all of the animations that could go into making a world. Using the world a central hub, the visualization will show the various animation clips from the original worlds that have been remixed into the new world. On the right, are the clips that users have taken from this world to remix into their own worlds. I still needed to think of a reason why a user would want to get to the remix history visualization. One idea that Paul mentioned was using the animations as a different form of browsing. It could be more efficient because looking through animations is faster since animations are shorter than worlds.

Monday was a day filled with exploration. I worked my way through MIT's Scratch, Youtube, Wikipedia, KongregateGames, various video hosting sites, etc. to see if I could get a better feel for animations and revision histories. There are interesting ways to display videos and animations all over the place, What may work best for LookingGlass is to create galleries that contain specific animations selected by a user. They could save animations into galleries for future use and organize the galleries as they wish. For example, a user could have a dance moves gallery or a animal actions gallery. Then when they are building a world, instead of having to rewrite the code for a shark swimming, they can look into their gallery for the appropriate animation and use it. This could use some discussion on how to encourage users to actually learn the programming concepts when they remix each time. This could probably be best done through the graduated tutorials that Kyle and Shannon are working on.

Tuesday morning, I attempted to expand the idea for bookmarking animations and encouraging users to visit the remix visualization page. It allows for greater efficiency since browsing through a single world could take just as long as looking at four or five animations. If all users are allowed to view animations in galleries, they can use this to identify useful animations that can be used in their own projects. The galleries would be created by an individual so we would not have to worry about a malicious user adding random animations to someone else's gallery. It is possible that the use of galleries could also help with tagging since users will want to be able to find their saved animations, the gallery names will hopefully be some what informative. The afternoon was spent in a brainstorming session to assist Reilly with the badge organization.

Wednesday, I went ahead and talked to Caitlin to get some more direction with my project. One thing that she suggested that I really liked was integrating the remix visualization into the world show page itself. This will hopefully elevate the use of remixes since it is so present every time a world is opened. However, I worry about making the show page too cluttered. There are already a number of things that are being added in the show page including badges, following, and tags. I have a couple of sketches, but I'll just post them all at the end. We continued to assist Reilly with badge organization in the afternoon.

Thursday, I continued to make sketches of a possible integration between the remix visualization and the world show page. The more I draw, the more I believe that putting the full remix visualization into the world show page will just make it far too cluttered. The progression of sketches will be illustrated below. I think the best option may be for the show page to include a few original animations and a few remixed animations to show users an idea of how remixing can happen. However, these will lead to the full remix visualization suggested earlier. Hopefully having a few animations on the show page will encourage users to be curious and find the other ones in the remix visualization. 

*Images are still not being uploaded. These link to GoogleDocs.

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