Web Development

- Noah

In the execution part, my main job is web development, to be specific, making the secondary pages. By following the intention of translating the workshop into a website, we divided the sites into two parts to create an engaging way that simulates the activity and showing participants' stories visually. On the first level page, there is an ocean composed of hourglasses viewed from a bird's-eye view, which is a visualization of the scene that participants were asked to image at the beginning of the activity. On the secondary pages, the first task is to continue the audiences' experience after they click on the selected hourglass. I made the motion track of the camera to realize this process of changing the perspective, from far to near, from top to head. In the rest tasks, I try to visually simulate the participants' image scenes by adjusting the lighting and the scale and movement of the object.

After deciding using the library A-frame as the main tool, whether to make web VR or normalized pages is the most severe problem that bothers me. When we think of engaging, VR seems to always appear as one of the first choices. Being able to explore freely in a three-dimensional world has always been a huge temptation. However, when I changed my thinking from why not use VR to why we would use it, the value of VR changed suddenly. In our case, on the one hand, controlling a camera that moves freely allows viewers to focus more on navigation and subconsciously distract from observation. On the other hand, when a narrative journey contains multiple stories, and the scene contains many different materials, VR can give the audience a tremendous non-linear storytelling experience. However, on our webpage, when we need the audience to pay attention to one hourglass and experience a story linearly, using VR loses its meaning. Therefore, showing normative webpages became my final choice.