Das Infohubbens!

So. LEt's talk Infohub.

Hi, LF -- you got the first post into the new forum! When you originally sent out that call-to-action IM for infohub design suggestions I responded with a few initial thoughts. Here's a cut and paste:


Quote:
...Looks like the infohub is sited on a 16m X 16m square, but the land is still part of that one large plot containing all the gov land in Miramare. They changed the name as Marcos requested on the hotline. Maybe we should stay quiet about that now, and see if having the big plot setup like that gives us more prims : )

When I was doing a rough survey of the actual region we'd probably get for the building site I noticed some minor troublespots. Like most of the infrastructure and terrain in Miramare, it's a bit rough. For example, along the north edge of that 16m X 16m square the terrain slightly overlaps the canal side border (concrete pavers) instead of forming a clean edge. At the northeast corner the two canal side borders meet a cylindrical prim, and you can see that they don't lie in the same plane. There are a couple of dips in the terrain that look like pointy potholes.

If we want a design with precisely finished edges we first need to decide how we're going to handle those problems. Actually adjusting the terrain and Linden prims would be best, but we might have to settle for just masking the problems.

Guys, I'm confused. Are we even able to ask for our own hub? Right now when people teleport to a sim they seem to be landing at 128,128. It's like the default spot. Are we allowed to change that? Do the lindens have to be involved?

And what would happen to zee info hub?

As I understand it the ex-telehub area in Miramare won't be turned back into a telehub, but LL intends it to be a community gathering place. They've placed a notecard giver there with info about resident design submissions for the permanent infohub. They want the design to incorporate two information kiosks and a Lindex ATM machine.

Barnes and I were talking about it, and he feels that the design of the Miramare infohub should evoke the characteristic styles of all four City sims, even though technically it is on Miramare soil. This sounds feasible. LF is partial to brick, which exemplifies Grignano, and I've put considerable time into studying the Miramare style, since I'm new there, and want my civic type building and plaza to complement the styles I personally admire there: the warm traditional materials of Barnes's stores, and the shiny sculptural look of the taller buildings. Barnes bridges that gap too, with those sculptural intersection curves on the facade of the store he did for Paolo.

My proposal is to use two large columns supporting an intervening horizontal rack to organize all the commercial objects we are required to accomodate. If that rack can organize all the advertising etc. into one restricted footprint of the infohub, it frees up more room for fun stuff and the attractive amenities other people might want to design. There's an example column on my Miramare lot, and I've tried rezzing it on the infohub land. When viewed there from the west the column does appear to capture the two major elements of Miramare style. Its stepped sandstone plinth is a warm traditional material used in a traditional form much like the stepped piers LF often uses on his buildings. The shiny sculptural elements of the column are embedded in the plinth to create a dramatic inntersection curve. The percentage of shiny increases as you look higher, and that's exactly what you see when you look past the column at the rest of Miramare. It's all sandstone at the base, and that would complement brick.

Starting this group forum, and using it for a collaborative design project like this is a really good idea, btw! I'm interested to see what other people have to say.

Yes, from this email it looks as if we can design our own. I agree it should have the bricks of Grig, the shiny of Marcos, and cuteness of Barnes. Maybe you could get together and design one, then present it to Robin. Or actually, the email says when you are ready to contact her for the next steps to take.



Caroline,


I'm thrilled you have a group! I was under the impression no one was interested. The transcript is on the forums following this post in Feature Feedback: /20/89/73209/14.html#post783635.


We're going to put a default hub in when P2P releases. Then we'll be working with residents to design replacement hubs which will be distributed around randomly. If your group has a hub for a specific region we'll be happy to put yours in there.


We will need to be able to place 2 kiosks in the space; otherwise you can open up the design as it suits your neighborhood.


When you're ready, please let me know and we can talk more about what steps to take next.


Cheers,
Robin

Actually, I'm mildly scheming to usurp the surrounding Linden land to fully incorporate a plaza/park design, because the actual designated Infohub area is pretty damned small.

My personal opinion is we should try to keep is non-monumental; rather, it should be inviting and open as a public space, and intimate enough so that people would want to hang out there. The raised Linden roadway provides a challenge, but perhaps we could even do some Link-fu and build a pedestrian walkway between the two Linden-owned parcels to connect the areas?

We should definitely work towards the strengths of the canals; maybe tables and chairs along them to make a nice chatting spot.

And yes, I'm definitely partial to brick; it makes an area seem so warm and fuzzy.

There is so much Linden cra..stuff now at the hub. It is getting messy quick.

build a infohub info
infonet
hippos and what kind of hippo are you
newspaper
land info
lindex

And tables and seats and a special dias with steps to raise up the advertising kiosks, and make them look more important. : ) There's not much room to walk around there so yes -- more land area would be great. If we can't get more land, then maybe that idea of vertical organization to minimize the footprint of the commercial stuff would help out. I'm assuming that we can replace the generic furniture with something made locally.

Lordfly, thanks for reminding me about this group forum. I'll try to jot my thoughts down here over the next few days.

Initial Random Thoughts on the Infohub at Miramare
(Please excuse me if the following doesn't completely make sense. It is just random thoughts I had as I was sitting at the Miramare telehub and taking it all in after reading the first few posts here in this group forum.)

Make it functional and tied in to the city. It should be as open and easy to maneuver through as possible.

The focus is the Lindens' two info kiosks and the Lindex terminal. It should also give folks a sense of where they are in the city. Maybe display simple map of city and surrounding area. Maybe part of wall. Like a permanent bulletin board.

I would almost like to see the floor level raised to that of the adjacent road, but the area actually shares the same level as Caroline's land and the sidewalk with bridge connection. Shouldn't change that. Maybe a barrier/wall along the street (brick) with seating built in for the trolley stop (see next paragraph). Perhaps split with an additional set of stairs to the road. The sides facing the interior of the Infohub could be an info wall.

See if Nigel Linden can change the trolly so it stops directly in front of the Infohub. We could put a bench there for folks to wait for it. A side benefit... it might make the transition to Barcola a bit smoother as it would stop right before the sim border.

The land should not directly reflect any individual neighborhoods (subject to change over time) but be able to stand on it's own as the center of a large urban area. Tie in with the original established looks. The foundations of the hub should reflect the foundations of the city and the basic infrastructure. Reuse the same materials. Brick from sidewalks and from under bridge crossings, etc. (Saves on having to load new textures.) That would take care of the Grignano/Sistiana influence. Use the style of Miramare high-tech look for the tech parts of the hub, info kiosk bases, lighting, etc. Now for Barcola... perhaps a discarded SLOPCO oil can? Just kidding.

Oh! Directional signage pointing to the different city neighborhoods?

Move Ingrid's city history info (from Marcos' land next door) and incorporate into hub, expand on it. Perhaps a place for resident's to add historical info? The Trolley Schedule Scrap Magellan Linden found when he discovered the lost city and a section/piece of the original ruins that were removed when the Lindens first set up the city infrastructure. A summary of folks who have had builds there and what they were. How coul dwe update that?

The city is so laggy, it would be nice to put railings up so folks don't accidentally go into the canals. Same railing style as small bridge.

Can we use just the functional parts of the kiosks and design our own bases? The current ones take up a lot of room. Would be nice to integrate them more into the area.

I don't think we need more trees there. The original city Linden trees are sufficient. But definitely landscape it nicely with plants.

I think this part has been touched on already. I know Marcos made a Hotline posting about the Miramare land and it's current setup. Right now, if someone double-clicks on any part of the Linden Miramare land they get sent to the Miramare Infohub. I think the Infohub should be it's own parcel (16x16). The remaining Miramare land should stay one large parcel but with no landing point, so that folks will arrive where they expect to, on a Linden road right where they double-clicked on the map. Let city land owners handle their own landing points. If they double-click on the infohub icon on the map, they land at the infohub's landing point. Center of hub.

I'll rough out my ideas for how I see the city infohub and post a location so folks can check it out.

Thanks,

Salazar

Check out the area I setup at Grignano 91, 248, 27. It's a mirror-image sized area of the real Miramare Infohub. The land is set to the City Slickers group so you'all can try out your ideas right there in the city. The parcel supports 117 prims.

Instead of leaving our builds there... perhaps we could use it to test out our ideas and then take them back into inventory for now. ANd then arrange a time where we could show them to each other there? What do ya'll think?

On second thought, maybe we could extend the level of the road a few meters into the hub land and create more of a sidewalk and parking area where folks could rez a vehicle in the city. The Miramare Infohub land is set to a 5 minute autoreturn so we wouldn't have to worrry about someone abandoning their car. I've added such a parking strip to the Grignano test area as an example.

Good news; we just got pre-emptive approval by Jesse Linden to use the empty Linden-owned plots surrounding our tiny Infohub area. So that means our design can be very encompassing and grand.

I'm working with Salazar to set up a work area somewhere where we can flesh out designs.

I'll let you all know.

Lordfly and I have begun roughing out ideas for the new Nova Albion Infohub area in the small east plaza in the Cowell village. I've set down a possible flow to the area in gray prims. Stop by and check it out. Your feedback is appreciated.

I like the simple and clean infohub. With some plants in planters it will be like a park/plaza.

The stadium seating is not needed, imho. And a walkway over the road I can't see as being useful. Just my blunt thoughts.


Nice work on the maps, I don't see how you do that.

Looks like a creative use of screenshots.

Caroline, I agree that an open parkland feel would be great here, and if I recall one of your earlier posts, we also agree that the present temp infohub layout by LL has too many separate items relative to the area of the site.

It's easy to agree on greenspace, and I think we all like the Linden canals. Harder to reach agreement on whether certain proposed builds enhance a site or not. I knew it was a long shot when I proposed using that sculptural column (example located on my lot in Miramare). Most people in this forum seem partial to a 'friendly realistic' style as opposed to 'Miramare Monumental'. : )

Predictably I find the walkway to be a clever way of getting more building space, but not sculptural/monumental enough! Presumably if I were to design a sculptural/monumental version of that walkway I'd find it enthralling, and everyone else would be saying, 'well, open parkland might be better...'

Here's where we find out if we actually can design cooperatively, and achieve a coherent result. By coherent I mean a unified design, not some solution like chopping up the infohub land into quarters, and letting four sub-groups each design something sim-specific on their respective quarter.

Linden Labs has given us a very short list of their requirements. The rest is up to us. What additional benefits do we want to achieve? Here are some possible examples not listed in any kind of priority order:

- the infohub spotlights the characteristic style of each of the four city sims.
- the infohub looks good from surrounding properties in a low-key, uncluttered way, not trying to compete with existing builds.
- the infohub is a showcase for city sim architects, designers, builders, furniture makers, sculptors, landscapers and graphic artists to display their talents.
- the infohub is a people place with amenities such as seating.
- the city sim infohub looks absolutely jaw-dropping relative to the designs of all other infohubs in SL.

I'm interested in hearing other peoples' ideas on what the list of possible benefits should contain. If we can agree on benefits, it might be easier to frame specific requirements to fill out that short list of Linden requirements. Then we could get together, and toss around ideas for meeting those requirements. We can have the meeting up in the dished top of my column; it's monumental enough to hold an entire discussion group. j/k : )

Can we get rid of the hippos? Caroline is right, it looks messy.

Shiny/bricky sounds good. Who's going to put this thing thing? I'm out, as I am back at work, holidays are over Not much time for buildage.

I do think there should be a lindex, a few freebies in a nice, simple vendor (i can put that together if people think it's appropriate)

I IM"d all the landowners in Grignano and Sistiana yesterday to make sure they were aware of what is going on and pointed them to this group thread. I'll contact the remaining landowners in Barcola and Miramare tonight.

LF, good to see this thing moving along so well!

some initial thoughts..

i agree that the InfoHub design should reflect the overall style of all 4 sims in Nova Albion. so far, it seems this means bricky/shiny.

i also agree our telehub should be a shining example of superior design! (but you know, that's just because i'm partial to the City. )

another idea, to start with.. as far as the "test area" goes.. perhaps we could start by fleshing it out, taking some snapshots, then (as mentioned) taking it back into Inventory. after that, we could post our individual ideas/designs to this thread and discuss what we see from each other to further increase coherence.

i'm planning on going in-world and seeing if i can come up with some ideas as well.. i'll return with anything i come up with. (hopefully faster than i build stuff on my own land.. lol)

again, i'm so glad to see that we finally have a group forum here!! and it's being put to such good use, right off the bat! it makes me proud to be part of Nova Albion.. not to mention, inspiring me to actually finish my build.

I contacted all the Barcola landowners this evening. Just Miramare now. Most of them are probably already aware of the Infohub revamp, but I'll get to them tomorrow.

Cybin, we will probably not be limited to the 16x16 sq. meter plot that the original Telehub occupied (like the test area I set up in Grignano). Jesse Linden indicated to Lordfly and I that they are open to us utilizing some of the adjoining Linden land.

To get an idea of what that might afford us:

I was talking to caroline tonight and I was thinking - And salazar brought up a good point about being able to update stuff. Are we going to have the ability to modify and tweak the telehub from time to time?

It occured to me the point of the infohubs [should] be to direct people around the local area. All the info hubs have the same stuff, info net terminal and the same free content. They are all the same, reall, all we need is one infohub in all of SL then. Unless however we are able to personalize it and update it at a regular basis to keep the information current and up to date.
I really like the idea of a map, what about making it interactive? All this would have to entail is a prim with a texture of the surounding area map, points of interest could then be marked on the map woth a lil prim, each point of interest could either contain a landmark or if possible a teleport script to take you to those points. Or it could be more complex if someone who was good at scripting wanted to do something cool with it.

Also maybe free content specific to Nova Albion and its residents? Can we do that?

Barnes, i'm not sure about the rest of the grid, but i believe the Nova Albion InfoHub will be City specific. created by City dwellers (i.e., City Slickers) to reflect our collective corner of the SL world.

i don't see why we couldn't do that.. it helps that the interactive map would be a cool feature, not to mention whatever other designs we come up with.

i'd love to see what everyone has been coming up with so far.. sort of play off of each others designs, yes?

like i said earlier, posting pics here would be a great way to head towards that goal. hopefully, i'll get around to designing something myself, as well. of course, i'd have to move MUCH faster on this than my own build.. which, i swear, i really am trying to get moving on. lol..

_

and Salazar, i still have to check out that area to see what we've got to work with in approximate area and such. that should help guide my neurons a bit..

I like the map idea too, and being able to update the map is crucial. This forum and group spam could be used to post an alert that some updating is necessary, for example, if land changes hands. The linden SLLM forum seems to work well for people to alert LL about necessary maintenance. We could do that here on our small scale if it becomes necessary.

We'd need to set the perms. Who gets to do the updating? Do we each update our own marker? I sure don't want to see the perms set so anybody can come in and make a mess of the city map. It's bad enough when people abandon their vehicles or plywood prims on city land (mine is now set on autoreturn).

Free content specific to Nova Albion and its residents sounds awesome. I need to replace my old free tree anyhow, because the alpha has that annoying white fringe effect. The urban plaza on my lot needs some kind of low mass planted conifers to drape over the planter walls under the branches of the linden trees. Have to check my RL yard for something suitable.



Exactly! That's where the fun is. The best way to accomplish this is if we could place prims on a full size version of Salazar's mockup. I've got some space in Miramare, and -- temporarily -- some free primmage. It's that site where Tiger used to have his apartment building. Right now it has a few Linden trees to keep it from looking like barren dirt. Those could be shuffled if they're in the way.

I actually was playing around with thoughts for the map - I believe we could make one where the map (and a couple of satellites in the other sims) read the land owners for each area like on a daily basis and will allow the owners to go and shoot a command to edit the prim that represents their building, along with perhaps a touch message (or notecard). This would allow for the current owner of the plot (within a day's tolerence) to indirectly edit their building marker, but would not require traditional perms. If there is interest (and LL gives a thumbs up) I could probably script it.

/edit - Just a thought - you think it is relatively safe to assume the plots (originally created by LL) will remain consistently whole? If so, it would decrease the need to scan the entire four sims, just pluck the land owner of a plot in the center.

I also think we should have some form of inner-city event sign/board - something to announce events, new releases, etc. within the city. Perhaps we could be a sanctuary for events that go beyond the normal junk in the listing.

On the actual appearance of the ex-HUB, I believe I would prefer an open space type setup - a sort of central park thing.

where are we with this?

My sense is that most people who post here seem to prefer an open park setting containing the directory/map idea as well as the required Linden objects. But I'm not sure why we're only hearing from a handful of City residents. Probably most of us who are enthusiastic about this project are deliberately waiting to let everyone else have a say, and for some reason not many new posters are entering the discussion.

My offer of a full size worksite in Miramare for prototyping infohub designs still stands, but it won't last forever. The civic type building (possibly a library) has developed a big appetite for prims.... : )

hiya, i'm still here. Got sidetracked with a bit of RL and some other SL-ish building.

I'm actually chomping at the bit to design the pedestrian walkway over the linden road; I have a partial vision forming in my head, and think it would make a nice eye-grabber if done right. A sort of central piece for the developed area.

Otherwise yeah, non-intrusive parkway/plaza/cafe-style atmosphere is my vote.

It's just a matter of building it for us all, I guess.