Looking Glass: The Return to Remixing

After RA Training, Orientation, and the first few days of school, it’s good to be back in the lab. Over the course of the summer, many ideas were developed for as usable designs for visualizing remix. The key was making sure to cover all the bases of what things users will find useful and what things are feasible to program. Looking back at the designs of the summer, remix had evolved into something that is intended to help introduce new users to the uses of remixing in worlds.

The current design makes animations searchable. These animations are taken from worlds that have been remixed and will link back to the original worlds. Furthermore, with the development of pre-fabricated remixes, these animations can be reused by other users without having to search through worlds to find just the right sequence of events to build a custom remix. Since the animation can be remixed again and again, it can also lead to multiple worlds.

To make the animations searchable, they will need to the same tagging functionality as worlds. Users can search for animations that can help them complete a particular remix badge. The animations can be tagged such that users can find a particular functionality to incorporate into their world. If a user becomes particularly well known for selecting interesting animations to remix, then they should be able to find these animations by the original remixer. Another possibility is that a set of animations can be created for just biped creatures or for swimmers in Looking Glass, so searching by the character doing the animation should also be possible.

Talking with Jordana, the semester will begin by finalizing the remix design. Since we are incorporating remix as a major component of Looking Glass and the Community website, ensuring that remixes and animations follow the rules of form and function will be key. It should look easily accessible even to new users of Looking Glass, but it should also successfully convey the “learning through remix” principles.

Some questions I have about the current design include:

• Whether or not this is an effective path to follow?
• Will the creation of pre-fabricated remixes prevent some users from ever going through the custom remix process themselves since, over time, a variety of animations will accumulate?
• Does showing the remix history as breadcrumbs really matter to the user in the search?
• Is there some sort of rebranding we can do for “Bookmarks” to make it clearer that bookmarking leads to remixing?

Beyond just the visual aspect, technical details also need to be discussed:

• What kind of data structure should be used to store the animations?
• When searching for animations, what order should they be displayed in? (sorting algorithms)
• How will we be linking this from the community to the IDE?
• How do we include the pre-fabricated remixes as a possibility to skip the remix step, but include the automatically generated tutorials?