VO, Week 3&4

The last two weeks have been very busy, leaving essentially no time for development of the VO. Anyways, I would like to publish this update and outline the plans for the next step.

First, in fact anybody I presented the idea to, found that a virtual meeting ground could have benefits in personal life, too, as in contrast to professional life. For that reason I rethought the term VO for "Virtual Office". To underlay a more general meaning I came up with VO potentially standing for "Virtual Ort", in which "Ort" stands for place in German. As well, everybody should be able to create his own orts and to invite others to them. An ort could really be anything, be it a beach, a forest, an office or even a classroom.

Second, the server needs a significant makeover. The ort needs to be held on server side. Users need to be registered and then need to be granted access to the different orts.

Third, the location needs to be procedurally generated to allow anybody to create their personal space. As well, it needs to look nice. To do that quite some additions have to be made to the current scenes.

Fourth, avatars need to be introduced. At the moment, every individual is represented through a grey box. However, this is clearly not enough. The avatar ideally should visually identify a person and as well express their emotions.

Fifth, interaction between users need to be promoted by having e.g. table tennis table for interaction.