Endstop Magazine

My freshman year at Kenyon, I built a virtual coffeeshop in Bryce for a CD-ROM on Bohemia that my friends and I were compiling for a class. Three years later, some underclassmen were putting together a webzine similar to Inkblots, but with a greater push on multimedia. They'd heard about this coffeeshop I'd built and wanted to use it for a navigational metaphor. The trouble was, I no longer had the models.

Actually, the loss of models was just fine. The result was a much more detailed coffeeshop, included above, that had blue lights where the user could click to access different areas. The bar took you to political commentary, the movie screen area to film reviews, the paintings over the booths to an art gallery, and so on. I even whipped up an interface to go with it (at right), but they elected to use a different layout instead, and have since adapted a different interface completely with the new editors.

The coffeeshop was built as quickly as possible, but it still took quite a while to iron out the quirks of Infini-D (for the models), Bryce (for the rendering environment) and QTVR (for the actual product). The textures were made in Illustrator and Photoshop. This was definitely a project I'd love to tackle again sometime.