Josephine Anstey

Ygdrasil: a framework for composing shared virtual worlds

Ygdrasil is a programming framework for creating networked, multi-user virtual worlds, especially interactive artistic worlds. It provides a shared scene graph, a plug-in system for adding new behaviors, and a high-level script interface for composing these worlds. We describe the architecture of Ygdrasil, and its use in creating two applications that were demonstrated at the iGrid 2002 workshop.

Technologies for virtual reality/tele—immersion applications: issues of research in image display and global networking

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has developed an aggressive program over the past decade to partner with scores of computational scientists and engineers all over the world. The focus of this effort has been to create visualization and virtual reality (VR) devices and applications for collaborative exploration of scientific and engineering data. Since 1995, our research and development activities have incorporated emerging high-bandwidth networks like the vBNS and its international connection point STAR TAP, in an effort now calledtele-immersion.

Collaborative virtual environments art exhibition

This panel presentation will exhibit artwork developed in CAVEs and discuss how art methodologies enhance the science of VR through collaboration, interaction and aesthetics. Artists and scientists work alongside one another to expand scientific research and artistic expression and are motivated by exhibiting collaborative virtual environments. Looking towards the arts, such as painting and sculpture, computer graphics captures a visual tradition. Virtual reality expands this tradition to not only what we face, but to what surrounds us and even what responds to our body and its gestures. Art making that once was isolated to the static frame and an optimal point of view is now out and about, in fully immersive mode within CAVEs. Art knowledge is a guide to how the aesthetics of 2D and 3D worlds affect, transform, and influence the social, intellectual and physical condition of the human body through attention to psychology, spiritual thinking, education, and cognition. The psychological interacts with the physical in the virtual in such a way that each facilitates, enhances and extends the other, culminating in a “go together” world. Attention to sharing art experience across high-speed networks introduces a dimension of liveliness and aliveness when we “become virtual” in real time with others.

Scripting the interactor: an approach to VR drama

In this paper, we describe a CAVE VR application, The Thing Growing, which is designed to engage the user in an emotional relationship with a computer-controlled character in the context of a fictional narrative. We discuss the process of building an interactor-centered virtual drama and assess The Thing Growing.

The agent takes the stage

The deployment of virtual characters in intermedia performance drives divergent agendas of this research group. From the perspective of performance studies, we examine the effect of computer-based characters as actors and believe explorations of mediated agency can open up new forms of engagement for live productions. From the visualisation point of view, we are interested in how abstraction and animation techniques, based on motion tracking and procedural methods, convey character and warp and extend the gestural repertoire of a human actor. In terms of interactive drama, we are working on stream of consciousness characters: algorithmically recombining text to create a psychological entity with an autonomous inner structure. From an artificial intelligence perspective, we investigate how to design and use intelligent agents as actors. These agendas reflect an odd mix of aesthetic and technical concerns, and rightly so, as they are driven by the different goals of our interdisciplinary team.

Human trials: an experiment in intermedia performance

Human Trials is simultaneously a public/private and embodied/disembodied performance. One user enters an immersive virtual environment and is led on an absurd quest. The challenges appear to be about control and the choices one makes in using power; but the games are rigged, the characters are duplicitous, the quest is a decoy, and the underlying test is how to cope with disempowerment. Meanwhile the experience is screened for a voyeuristic audience primed by reality TV. The audience members simultaneously watch multiple viewpoints of the virtual world, while live performers, networked into the virtual environment, attempt to entangle the protagonist in their improvisational machinations. The project combines virtual reality, networking, and artificial intelligence technologies.

Agency and the “emotion machine”

In interactive fiction or drama the authors role in manipulating the user into dramatic situations is as important in the construction of the users sense of ”agency,” as concerns about the her freedom and choice.

Commodity-based projection VR

This course teaches the details of building a moderate-cost, single-screen projection-based virtual reality system. It will cover the basics of virtual reality - stereoscopy, tracking, audio - and the options for implementing them with commodity hardware. Open source software to drive the system will also be discussed.

VR for Public Consumption

Project name: Virtual Vouni, the museum of the future. Status: Opened 2003 Site name: http://www.virtualrules.net/vouni Developers: Bino Nord , Tomas Cool Colbengtson, In co-operation with: Reachin, Stockholm Sweden Medelhavsmuseeum, Stockholm Sweden CID Center for Interactive design, PDC Parallel Computer Center KTH, Royal Institute of Technology Country: Sweden Start year: 2003 End year: 2005 Project type: Immersive distributed Virtual reality

Building an affordable projective, immersive display

Immersive, interactive virtual reality is a tool with hypothetically limitless uses. However, so far it has been put to serious use primarily in technical application areas such as computational science, automotive engineering, and chemical exploration. Groups working in these fields often have large budgets and can afford expensive, advanced displays. VR should also be of value to schools and museums, but most of them have much smaller budgets than major research labs, or are not able to support high-end graphics workstations. A simple, affordable, projection based display system can make VR far more accessible. In schools, displays could be put into individual classrooms and not just a central computer lab. In the museum world, small institutions would be capable of showing cutting edge digital work that previously has been restricted to a few large museums. This workshop describes the construction of a single screen, passive stereo, VR display based on commodity, or otherwise low-cost, components. There are many options available for the major elements of such a system and the basic system can be modified or adapted to many different styles of use. Figure 1 shows a photo of such a system in use at the University at Buffalo.