Creating a virtual navigation environment starts with the visualization of a metaphor. This Made@MAT Web-Project considers some of the pitfalls in using a metaphor (visual or poetic) as the basis for a visualization in a navigational web-environment.

Visual Content:

• Digital Hand Drawings ( Jean Sinclair)
  
  
• Ambient and Architectural Lighting
  
  
• Interactive light
  
  
• Animation (Cell Animation, VR Animation, or QuickTime Movies)

• Light Interaction & Historical Stained Glass
  
  
• Ray Tracing (Surface & Light Interaction)
  
  
• Art History (Vermeer & Mondrian)

Opening a Crystal

The metaphor of "Opening a Crystal" grew out of the image of "A Crystal Palace." The descriptive act of:"opening-up" helps guide the design of interactivity in this web-project. Crystals were choosen more as a medium than as a single image. Crystals allowed us to cultivate a range of visual content based upon:

• Transparency vs. Opacity
  
  
• Symmetry & Complexity
  
  
• External Obstructed Space & Internal Accessways
  
  
• Light Activity (Optical Flow) in Motion
  
  

The successful completion of this Web-Project points us in the direction of Virtual Reality without depending upon a nice sounding metaphor or an attractive image. This web-project will succeed or fail according to an ability to determine behavioral traits in a virtual environment.

Interactivity

This web-project joins conventional illusionistic 3-D perspective drawings and 3-D computer animation graphics to accentuate light activity. The development of this interactive web-site integrates hand-drawn 3-D and 3-D computer graphics as an alternative approach to VRML and other "3-D virtual navigation web-site design interfaces.

• How to render navigation in a place that does not exist, without any geographic or architectonic reality?
  
  
• How to render navigation in a place without any point of reference to base the dynamics of motion?
  
  
• How to merge: metaphor, virtual reality, & visual communication?
  
  
• How will the visitor's spatial exploration rely upon cinematic effects, animation techniques, or other web-related characteristics?

The next stage in this Web-Project will be the development of an interactive interface based on Jean Sinclair's sketches. The interface I am designing will give a visitor snapshots of program offerings available at the Media Arts & Technology Department.