From "First Person Shooter" to Multi-User Knowledge Spaces
Mathias Fuchs, Sylvia Eckermann · 2001
multi-user game engines such as Epic Megagames' UNREAL engine to be extremely useful tools for the design of knowledge spaces. For a collaborative project with 10 Viennese museums 1 we developed a semantic matrix for a cross-disciplinary exhibition showing items from different collections (Sigmund Freud Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Natural History...). The content provided by these museums had to be made accessible and comprehensible to users of different ages, educational backgrounds and computer literacy. We developed a system of connotations amongst the objects, which then was translated into a spatial structure of rooms, corridors and places of different sizes, shapes, remotenesses or proximities. The viewer/listener of our knowledge space explores a semantic structure by navigating virtual spaces with the topics being contained in these rooms. The connecting architecture between these rooms resembles staircases, passages, elevators, hidden doors or portals, each of them referring to the nature of the connotation. Quite contrary to web-based databases and hypertext structures, the links therefore possess a quality of their own, carrying much more information than just is connected with.