A virtual reconstruction of my town’s municipal museum, built solo in a multi-user 3D environment and scripted in LSL. Four zones: exhibition, a multimedia screen, a space where visitors make and share their own pieces, and an auction stage.
The premise was accessibility — that someone with reduced mobility could visit without the building. The premise does not survive contact with the build, and that is the useful part. Navigating this world takes a keyboard, a mouse, free-camera control and object manipulation; it asks for more fine motor precision than moving through a museum does, not less. And the parts I was most pleased with make it worse: creating your own artwork and putting it up for auction are the highest-dexterity interactions in the whole thing.
The moment that made it visible was building the lift. In a world with no physics constraints I could have let avatars move between floors by flying, or removed the floors entirely. Instead I scripted a lift with a seat and a prompt — I had rebuilt the building’s physical accessibility solution inside a medium that never needed it, because I was reproducing the museum rather than questioning what a visit is for.
The scripting is where the work is. Proximity sensors open doors as an avatar approaches, exhibits respond to clicks with their information, the lift moves on request. In the recording you can watch the sensor events firing in the chat log as I walk — the world announcing its own state, which is the closest thing this build has to a debugging view.
It was meant to be a group project. The group did not turn up, so the scope is what one person could finish.