Putting your home into Domisilica

Sponsor	Gregory Abowd abowd@cc.gatech.edu 380 CRB and 240 CCB
Area	HCI, Software Engineering and Future Computing Environments

Problem
In this project, you are invited to put your own living quarters into the Domisilica MUD. You will need to have a character created in the MUD to represent you and then you will need to learn how to investigate the current virtual world of Domisilica and carve out your own space. There are a number of rooms already built in Domisilica, and there is even a complete house that exists. How far you take this with your own space depends on your interests. For example, if you want to experiment with audio, you can pipe sound into your physical home when some Domisilica character enters your virtual home. If you want to experiment with X10 appliance control, one of our undergraduates (Jonathan Somers) has a way to get information from your physical home (such as the lighting conditions) to automatically update the state of your virtual home. Background

Look into the Domisilica Web pages and read the GVU Techical report by Jen Mankoff and Gregory Abowd on Domisilica. The overview of Domisilica for 7100 also has a number of resources you can access to learn how and what to do. The most important resource is Jen.
Jonathan Somers has put his own house into Domisilica and he can offer good advice.

Deliverables

Demonstrate that your house is in Domisilica. If you are able to provide a graphical blueprint of your home, you can relatively easily provide a graphical front-end to Domisilica visitors to navigate in and out.
Write a brief Web report on your experience, answering the following questions:
- How does your virtual home deal with whether or not you are present in the physical home?
- How would you modify things to get your physical location to modify the virtual world?
- Do you separate out your physical presence from your virtual presence?
- How can you use Domisilica to extend the boundaries of your physical home?
- How could you use Domisilica to promote social collaboration?

Evaluation
If you are able to create one or more rooms in the MUD and provide a way to graphically navigate to it through the Web-based interface to Domisilica, you will get full credit. If you are interested enough to pursue some of the other issues in the list of questions above, we can talk about further work.