Huyton Library - Knowsley Council Digital Twin
- allazarr
- May 11, 2021
- 7 min read
The Knowsley Council collaborative project was a full journey of great ideas and multiple technical difficulties that we needed to overcome by collaboration and teamwork. The project concentrated on the community of Huyton, a small town in Knowsley, that lost its connection especially during the Covid-19 Pandemic. This project proposes to bring the community together in a digital environment of the town. The projects present 9 important locations from Huyton focused on different areas and aspects of the community, Environmental Quality, Local Economy, Local Innovation, Empowering Education, Creative Expression, Celebration and Playfulness, History and Heritage, Participatory Citizenship, and Social Solidarity. All these rooms were created to encourage people to gather and discuss the local problems of the town and how to solve them. It is both a safe way of meeting with others and a good opportunity to communicate ideas.
Empowering Education - The Library
As the hub for the Empowering Education theme we've chooses the Library of Huyton. This building is a centre for recreation, group sessions and education for the whole community of the small town. The library is a cultural centre with over 1000 books and other educational materials available physically and online. The library will be moved to a different location in the upcoming time and the old building will be replaced with a community market. Based on this update, the digital twin of the library can be used for the people of Huyton to continue to access those online materials and even use the website integration to access their essential learning materials. Being connected with the educational materials is essential for a beneficial academic progression. Losing access to this hub can be a discontinuity in studies that can further affect the overall educational results.
What are the problems?
Primary school results show year on year improvement but remain below the national average - As the results are improving they are below the national average of Education in England. This is caused mostly by the lack of technical innovation as part of the educational system.
Knowsley has the lowest rate of 19-year olds with Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications in England - Teenagers do not aim for higher education from the lack of encouragement and overall lack of interest in the community and local business.
Fewer older people are in employment in Knowsley - Without further studies, the older population is unemployed and at risk of unsustainability over long periods of time.
Older people who have a learning disability are at risk of becoming socially isolated and lonely - older people are remaining unintegrated inside their community due to the lack of innovation and social events.
What are we proposing?
Using contemporary technology, the Huyton Digital Twin proposes a change among the town's thinking, bringing them together to create and innovate the place they are leaving in. Inside the digital library, both the young people and the elder ones can meet and share ideas about the city and its problems. Using Mozilla Hubs we can share this experience with anyone who has access to a smartphone device or a computer. Being placed inside the local library, the participants of the event can relate to real events that are happening outside. During the Covid-19 Pandemic, the majority of social interactions happened online mostly using communication platforms as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. The Digital Twin proposes an upgrade to this method of communication in a new environment using creativity and art.
Why Mozilla Hubs?
Social VR platforms are unique as they enable users to have a spatial online presence
that is different to the flat presence powered by video conference platforms such as Zoom. Space is an important part of social interaction and it makes it more memorable.
Additionally, Mozilla Hubs is easy to access and easy to use from the development point of view. To create in Mozilla Hubs, you do not need any coding skills and it is allowing your creativity to run free. The platform has its own builder named Spoke. In Spoke you can import your own 3D models or use the ones created by the community on Google Poly or Sketchfab.
Production
The production has been split into 12 weeks of intense brainstorming and work. The task has been self-assigned to individual members based on their skill set. The way the project was organised was via Miro.com. Miro is a collaborative space of work where a team can work in real-time sharing ideas and adding elements to a virtual pinboard. This software helped us to organise the project, share ideas and establish roles inside our team. The lockdown we've experienced during the production of this project laid new challenges in front of us. Being limited to only communicating online, the organisation within the team was loose. Unable to meet the rest of the team and discuss the ideas together, the project got a slow pace of development restricting us from taking risks and exploring more possibilities.
Another factor that massively influenced the development of the project was unfamiliarity between the team members. Being a freshly assembled team coming from different technical backgrounds, we needed extra time to figure out the pipeline that we are following with our work. From my point of view, coming from a film background, the phases of the production are different than in game development. This lack of proper communication leads to a much less ambitious result. This being the problem we've been facing during the production empowered the idea of the project and makes it more relevant. However, after all these technical and social problems, the team organised itself quickly once we've got used to each other and understood everyone's workflow. We got split up into micro teams of 2-3 people working on each room. The benefit of using Mozilla Hubs and its editor is that we can exhibit the potential of creating 3D assets and VR experiences from both the experienced user and a new starter points of view.
Technical Development
The 3D model of the library was created based on the real plans of the library from Huyton. Using online materials from the Knowsley Council I could imagine and design the structure of the building. Using archive images from inside the library I incorporated the shape of the library and the furniture inside. Using Spoke for composing the final room I was limited in the number of polygons I could use for my model, so I was forced to shrink the number down leaving me with an overall low-poly look. The outside structure was created in Blender using real measurement obtained from Google Earth satellite imaging. The Empowering Education room was assigned to me and Elissa Cooper. I was the 3D artist for the room and Elissa took the tasks of bringing everything in Spoke assembling the final scene. Spoke, the web editor of the Mozilla Hubs is an easy to use 3D editor that allowed this project to take shape in the short given time. The furniture of the library was a combination of blender assets created by me and Google Poly assets from Spoke. Working collaboratively, we designed the space inside the library to serve 2 important purposes.
The Ground Level will serve as an educational and social place. The participants can join the room and explore the library virtually. Here will be placed links to educational materials that can be found on the online website of the Huyton Library. As long as the books and audiobooks, virtual support can be integrated into the room where users of the experience can interact with the staff of the library for solving their daily problems.
The First Floor will be designated to group meetings, conferences, and business discussions. As a much formal space, presentations can be held on a big screen and people can discuss and comment on it in real-time. This room will resemble a normal face to face meeting where teams can meet and discuss ideas. Also, the place in the discussion can help the local and small business of Huyton to pitch their ideas to potential investors.
Right now the room is just a prototype of what it can be, letting multiple purposes undiscovered. The furniture inside the model was made to resemble the real objects that can be found inside the real library. The bookcases were filled with books and board games to resemble both the educational side of the building but also the community around it. As in the actual library are available multiple resources for multiple purposes, for example, books, movies, presentation places, etc. in the digital twin of it I found it essential to represent a glimpse of all of these elements.
The display panels were modelled after the archive footage of the library found online. They are screens of multiple sizes that can help to display information about the events taking place inside the room and the online materials available at the venue.
The real library is a building covered with glass panels offering a modern design of the structure. Unfortunately Spoke can not handle transparent or reflective materials that can resemble the glass. The outcome of this problem was using an Alpha material of a colour that can be close to the blueish reflections of a normal window. The alpha materials were applied to the thin walls of the building that finally looked like a glass panel. The entire progress of building the library was guided by Alexandra Ardelean which tutored me several times through Blender. As a newcomer to Blender, I was having difficulties finding the right setting and the modifiers I was needed to apply on my mesh. She helped the development of the building and my learning curve during the production phase of the project.
Conclusion
The Digital Twin of Huyton was a project that challenged our skills and the ability to collaborate on difficult times of the pandemic. The result is in its early stages and can be constantly developed to reach bigger audiences. The project is a multitude of digital rooms that comes as a substitute for the standard communication variants bringing down some of the social barriers existent. It is an innovative way of bringing people together in a safe environment while still having access to the essential educational materials. Based on recent studies, the online conferences brought new social anxiety as the web camera can be too intrusive inside others life. Using Mozilla Hubs, you can overcome this anxiety by making use of a digital avatar while you are present at the social event. On the other hand, the online space can be a replacement for a physical space while maintenance or replacement are being made to the physical venues.
From a technical point of view, the Digital Huyton Library was the result of collaboration and teamwork that led to overcoming the technical barriers and finally achieving a usable result for the Council.
References:
Software:
Archive:
Comments