One of the discussions we had during project studio led us to ask a question about modeling three-dimensional game spaces in which journalism could take place. In his article "What Should You Show in a Graphic?" Alberto Cairo discusses the depiction of 3D space in the flat graphics of print or the computer screen. One of the difficulties of this space, he points out, is that news editors often want them to be dressed up to have more visual appeal. The problem is that this often means making up details of a scene that might be inaccurate or at least irrelevant. What I would like to address is what happens when the space rendered in this graphic is turned into a 3D space like those in games.
To ground my hypothetical thoughts in some realistic manor, I'd like to consider a relatively specific space that could be modeled in a graphics engine like Valve's Source (used for Half-Life 2). As we are students at Georgia Tech, news on the campus is relatively important to us. Because this news is tied to a geographically specific region that remains relatively static, some intrepid students at The Technique have enlisted the help of their game-savvy friends to build the Georgia Tech campus using the Source engine. That way, any time a story hits, they have a pre-made map in which to set the elements of the story.
So what exactly should they model? Because we often think of geographic stories in terms of map and location, it seems like creating a model of the campus exterior is the most useful way to explore the space. For starters, if people are expected to "play" in this space it's important that buildings are to scale and placed in the correct locations. However, once this is accomplished, we start asking questions about what details to include:
- Should buildings facades be the correct color and material?
- Is the covered part of the bus stop important, or are just the benches?
- Do you include pathways that students create by walking and matting down the grass or just the concrete sidewalks?
- How much attention do you pay to the changing face of the landscape?
- What do you do about people in the space?
Next we have to think about how to actually include the news in these spaces. Do you play out the event? Do you watch a re-creation? Or perhaps the Portal director's commentary model could work: as you move around the space you find icons to activate audio recordings that detail the important information. Perhaps this format could help the school journalists deploy breaking news stories. They could insert their information into a sort of XML format which would tell the 3D environment what goes where (insert audio_file00x.mp3 at location [coord,coord]).
And yet, this is all presupposing that the exterior structure of the campus is the most important part of the construction. How many stories on campus take place outside versus inside? The inside spaces are going to be more difficult to render accurately, so do you just build the interiors as they become relevant to a news story? From a practical standpoint this makes the most sense, but if we throw technical limitations out the window we can question whether we would even need the exteriors if most events take place inside. Referring back to the Cairo illustration above, could we just use an insert-map to position the event while focusing on the construction of rooms and hallways? Being that a college campus has some architectural consistencies (at least building to building), perhaps there could be a set of assets pre-made (like chairs, shelves, books, desks) that can easily be instantiated in the space.
These are, of course, just some initial musings on the possibilities of 3D space for news. These possibilities can change drastically depending on the context, so there is no one way to think about it. I encourage you, our trusted reader, to suggest other ways of spatially situating news.
![[view full size]](http://jag.lcc.gatech.edu/blog/cairo-interiorLG.jpg){kind=link}
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