Piloting CyberHouse has begun by testing the effectiveness of an entrance animation to stimulate self-representation. In April 2003, I (Karen Keifer-Boyd) used the animation in an art lesson at a school for pregnant youth in South Allison Hills, Pennsylvania. The girls looked at a large digital projection on the wall close in front of them of an animated breathing house, while I led a visualization with them. I asked the girls to physically “breath with the house.” Breathing with the house focused them. With their breathing coordinated to the movement of the house, I suggested the house was their body. Their changed response from aggression and non-motivation to collaboration and enthusiasm to create, provides a guide to online pedagogy, as I continue to build the CyberHouse prototype to engage players in self-representation and collaboration.

MySQL database programming provides the functionality so that a “gamer” can upload his or her icon into the site. The file will be associated with the person so a user ID and object ID process will be programmed to connect the two.

Kumar Desai will program the game so that the uploaded image appears to enter the doorway and once inside the room the player's icon increases in size filling about half the space. The other half of the space looks like a mirror reflecting the image. Therefore one's self-representation is doubled. However, there will be programmed one variation to occur in the reflection, such as a reversal to problematize one's self-representation.

The doubled image glows in the center and is darker on the periphery. The glowing center can be activated to enter one of the three worlds that I will create with assistance from Ovid Boyd and Hui-Chun Hsiao. The darker periphery can be clicked on to enter one of three, second set of worlds.

Kumar Desai will program CyberHouse so that the gamer's selection of images are stored to become the player's profile. I, along with Ovid Boyd and Hui-Chun Hsiao will create CyberHouse's interactive animations.

When the gamer has made all of his or her selections in the six worlds their stored selections will form a world (or room). Kumar, the programmer, will structure the database. I will make the elements that will go into the players’ spaces, and conceptualize which elements to store for various configurations from players’ specific choices (in the 6 initial worlds visited) that make their world.

The programmer, Kumar Desai, expects to accomplish the above described database programming in 100 hours from the period June 1, 2004 to October 1, 2004. I with Ovid Boyd, and Hui-Chun Hsiao plan to work on the animations beginning in June 2004. Our goal is to make 60 of the 180 animations for the entrance into CyberHouse by October 1, 2004. We'll continue until we've made 180. An infinite number can be added. The animations are the choices that occur in the 6 worlds: womb, closet, sky, shopping, group interaction, and nature.

This first part of the game will be piloted in late fall 2004 and refined in 2005 prior to constructing the second phase of the game in 2005-2006, which involves interaction among players to remove together the damaging social labels.

How funds will be expended during the grant period of 2004 to create CyberHouse:

• Programmer (Kumar Desai) at $50 per hour x 100 hours = $5000
• Assistants (Ovid Boyd & Hui-chun Hsaio) to create animations in Flash software at $25 per hour x 100 hours = $2500
• Project concept development, research, artistic direction, FLASH animations, and Web design (myself at $0 x 500+ hours)=0
• I received $3,588 from The Pennsylvania State University College of Arts and Architecture Faculty Research Grants 2004-2005 for CyberHouse.

TOTAL ($7500 - $3588 PSU grant) = $3912