Forum Discussion
✨ Friday Fun Prompt: What’s Your “Dream Build”?
OK, I'll share. This was an off the cuff idea from several years ago resulting from some casual ID discussion. I used to work in academic Forestry, teaching a field forest measurements lab. Labs are remote, long, and often difficult to fully experience the full gamut of possibilities. I thought about the design of a field lab simulator in Storyline where I could create a predetermined a set of tree cases, scattered across a 3D landscape. I would then generate random filler trees at a density appropriate for the overall forest. The learners would then traverse the landscape, locate the identified trees, set up a measurement plot, conduct measurements, record data, and then process this as normal into a lab report. The learners would have to contend with specific issues related to tree form, environmental factors, tool limitations, and plot designs. The landscape could be roughly modeled from local map elevation data. It could be done as VR, but I'm not really into that.
I've identified the various (free) tools and libraries to make it happen in SL, though it would be significant work but not unmanageable. What is the holdup? Time, my own high standards at odds with my limited skillset in 3D modeling, and the fact that I don't work in that area any more. The exercise would be more academic than anything else, and while that's fine and often the case for my side projects it lessens the overall motivation.
That would have been really cool. It's almost like we need to be able to connect some of the features like what you can do with Unity into StoryLine to help elevate and make some of these ideas possible.
I visited the Alpine Zoo in Innsbruck during the summer and they were gathering some really clever data on some of their trees. They had sensors embedded in to the tree trunks and they were reading data such as hydration levels, amount of growth over time, whether the trees were deficient in any nutrients etc.
You can imagine how a course like this would actually be something a museum or botanical garden could use as an interactive way for people who don't live nearby to visit the gardens, or for school groups to use them as extra points of interactivity. Seems like DavidTait Nathan_Hilliard and SuperSuze have a little power squad here to do a build-a-thon 😅
