When you visit JJIE VW Grid, you will arrive at the JJIE Welcome Workshop Arrival Area on a rocky ocean cliff surrounded by ocean waves and open skies. In the Arrival Area, you will find information about The Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University, the CSJ Juvenile Justice Information Exchange program and the JJIE VW Grid project. There is a basic avatar skills flip book for virtual world newcomers, a JJIE virtual world map of all four regions and a local region Welcome Workshop Levels Map Teleport Board. Each region is 256 meters square (approximately 16 acres) and has immersiveexeriences on multiple sky platform levels as well as the ground level.
A interactive giver box provides JJIE Virtual World Tour landmarks when mouse clicked. The interactive landmark automatically tlelports (moves) a user’s avatar to the landmark’s location. The Welcome Region’s 3D immersive orientation path experiences are under continuous development through December 2015. The virtual development is “responsive” – based on current best practice research and user feedback from our project interns and visitors – so our Welcome Region changes as we collect more data.
Welcome Workshop
The Welcome Workshop region’s Arrival Area is also our main JJIE Virtual World Tour Start Point. The Welcome Workshop region is built on gentle, rolling hills with several region-size sky platforms. In the Arrival Area of each region you will see a graphic illustration of each level in the region with live teleport links. You can automatically teleport to any destination on any level by clicking on the location’s title.
Tour Tip: To see a virtual world artist’s 3D work in action, visit the 1,500 meter level’s northeast corner, where still image lighting production is underway (November 2015) for the “Forgive” poem machinima.
Below you see the Welcome Workshop Region’s click-to-teleport board.
Workshop Region Two
In the JJIE Workshop Two region we have a fully developed Chicago neighborhood circa 1990’s, built by our intern uber Producers, Derek Maier and David Eric Nelson during the summer semester. This set was developed for our first machinima production about a young boy detained by police, The Kid, The Cop, The Punch. Currently, this region is being re-utilized as backgrounds for flashback still shots in our upcoming machinima about Christopher Thomas, a 30-year-old man incarcerated at the age of 14. We invite you to visit and explore the neighborhood. There are several Non-Playing Characters (NPC) “bots” wandering about Chicago 24/7. Please do not take offense if they are not very talkative.
Workshop Regions One and Three
JJIE Workshops One and Three regions are used for experimental/project builds and OAR (OpenSimulator Archived Region) digital asset mining. Regions with all their content can be saved as an OAR file, then re-loaded into the virtual world to pull and save specific assets from the archived region into a new region. This ability to reuse 3D assets greatly reduces a region’s development timeline and production costs.
Currently, JJIE Workshop Three is being used for the production of the Christopher Thomas machinima. We are using several region-sized platforms for different aspects of the machinima production pipeline. The Workshop Three Region Map Teleport Board seen below is on each platform in the region for quick transport between production task area levels.
