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Dec
18
ChatScape
Kind of delayed posting this, but better late than never, right? :P
This was my textscape project for 534. ChatScape is a chatroom visualizer, so each stick figure represents a real person in the chatroom and they wave their arms when the person is speaking. If a person speaks within fifteen seconds of the previous response, their avatar will move over to the previous speaker's avatar, assuming that they're speaking to one another and grouping them accordingly.
Participants in the chat can also command their avatar to move around in ChatScape by typing #top, #down, #left, #right, and #stop commands. There is also a #follow (username) command, which does exactly what it sounds like it does. If no one in the chatroom speaks for five minutes, the avatars line up and start to do the conga. (sort of.)
Since I showed this at the last seminar a couple weeks ago, I added one feature... some actual text! If you mouseover a stick figure in ChatScape, you will see a bunch of words start to fly across the top of the room, like clouds. These words are actually a collection of tags that have been collected about each individual by a chatbot that sits in the chatroom and these lists are growing all the time. It is possible to hover over multiple avatars at the same time and you will see all of their words flying across the screen at the same time, in different colors.
I took video of ChatScape in action, as it only works for this particular chat type... will link it once it's finished uploading to Google Video.
Yay winter break!
[edit] So the video quality when converted to Flash format is so terrible that you really can't tell what's going on at all, since you need to be able to see thin lines and be able to read text. So here's just the full .avi on FileFront.
