“Bloom” – Make Your Own Virtual Garden

“Bloom” is a playful collaborative platform for building virtual gardens in Second Life. It aims to make friends collaborate to create a unique virtual garden together, and take their designs back home, or share it with other residents. Bloom focuses on the ideas of simulation, interactivity,  group collaboration and emergence to create a compelling creative experience. The idea is simple: the more friends you have helping you design, the more interesting your garden gets! Collaboration is the key to variety in Bloom..

It all begins with a 10×10 mt square board, similar to a checker board but with numbers on each 100 faces. These boards are modular, so residents can design their own gardens as large as they want. As the participants begin wandering on this platform, the scripted faces will generate representations of various natural objects and plants, such as grass, flowers, trees, stones or water. As the participants continue travelling and begin to interact through their paths, the scripted faces will make connections between them to visualize their contribution. The idea is to have fun together by creating a virtual garden..

Bloom project is designed by the winning ‘Production Zone’ team in ‘Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and User Driven Innovation” Workshop, held in June 7th-9th 2010 in Magleås, Denmark. The design team of Bloom consists of: Associate Professor Mia Consalvo (School of Telecommunications, Ohio University), Dr. Yesha Sivan (Head of Information Systems program at the Tel Aviv Yaffo Academic college), Assistant Professor Jeffrey Wimmer (Technical University Ilmenau, Department of Virtual Worlds / Digital Games), PhD candidates Maria Bäcke (Digital Games, Blekinge Institute of Technology), Mitchell Harrop (University of Melbourne), Ates Gursimsek (Roskilde University) and Elia Giovacchini (Stockholm School of Economics)..

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