Michal Masa

Virtual House of European Culture: e-AGORA

This co-operative project links up important European centres of art and culture and creates an open network with an innovative application of the new information technologies: the creation of an unconventional and highly efficient communication base founded on an interactive, multimedia and transdisciplinary approach to the production and presentation of contemporary forms of performing arts. The main channel of this project is the revolutionary communication and navigation system e-AGORA, which enables visitors to move intuitively in a virtual 3D environment on the Internet. In the VIRTUAL HOUSE OF EUROPEAN CULTURE a broad spectrum of the public can investigate contemporary Euro-regional artistic programs in real time and communicate interactively. At the same time, it is an instrument of individual and collective artwork in the domain of contemporary performing arts as it opens up a new horizon for a multidisciplinary form of artistic expression and presentation of artworks. The implementation of the project VIRTUAL HOUSE OF EUROPEAN CULTURE also has important theoretical and educational dimensions: a series of practical workshops, an international academic conference, thematic exhibitions, the production of the e-AGORA CD-ROM and a printed publication.

DILEWA: the distributed learning environment without avatars

Multi-user VR systems are mostly aimed at social interaction, whereas exploitation of shared virtual environments for educational purposes has been largely ignored. We introduce the notion of tutor-based systems and consider the main differences between a tutor-based multi-user system and a social interaction system. In the proposed approach, one of the users is the tutor while the others represent auditors. This paper focuses on possible means for expressing a tutors role including special auditors operating modes supported by the mechanism of net-routes. Theoretical considerations have been tested on the DILEWA experimental system.

From Textual Chats to Interest Groups in 3D Virtual Space

While the textual chat is a highly popular tool for various kinds of social interactions, its extension to the visual three-dimensional domain remains almost untouched and without practical utilization yet. This paper discusses advantages and disadvantages of spatial virtual environment when used as a platform for connecting people and serving for social and cultural interaction. The differences between textual chat and interest groups in virtual reality are highlighted with the aim to overcome the gap between well-established chat technology and promising but still a bit exotic virtual reality approach. Theoretical analysis is followed by several examples taken from experimental setup.

Interest Management for Collaborative Environments Through Dividing Their Shared State

Not all participants in a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) need to be informed of every other participant’s activities. The technique used for filtering irrelevant messages is known as interest management, which has to minimize network traffic and to reduce the burden of clients. However, considering the CVE shared state maintenance, interest management is nothing else than a disruption of the perfect case where every CVE participant maintains the identical copy of the state. In this paper we present an interest management technique that organizes the shared state into domains and sub-domains and enables clients to express their interest in particular sub-domains only. This approach specifies an interest management in a general way and it can be used for a wide range of CVE applications. Key ideas are being implemented as part of General Variables (GV) library and verified in our testbed CVE system for social interaction called e-Agora.

eGaLab: a new dimension for artists

Presenting art in the age of the Internet brings along several misunderstandings: there occurs, for instance, a profound difference between online galleries or museums providing a simple point and click navigation in multimedia documents on the one hand, and some of the newly emerging presentation platforms that reflect contemporary artistic creation in its essential dependence on electronic media (e.g. net.art or virtual sculpture), on the other. The eGaLab (Electronic Gallery and Laboratory) project advances possibilities to create and present artworks on the Internet. It introduces an intuitive approach in the field of virtual environments as well as communities oriented towards visual art and shared artistic collaboration. eGaLab combines and transforms the advantages of collaborative virtual environments with the traditional aspects of artistic creation and presentation. In this paper we describe the architecture of the eGaLab platform. We describe its networking part based on a concept of General Variables and discuss several implementation issues related to its specific character. Copyright

Cooperative Design for Artistic Performances

ALTERNE (Alternative Realities in Networked Environments) platform aims at providing a high level of integration between various techniques supporting mixed reality, graphics, interaction and behavioral models. This paper focuses on two collaborative aspects the platform provides. First, it contains a virtual object repository, which allows artists to share their ideas and support collaboration on projects based on ALTERNE platform. Second, it enables direct and remote access for public visitors to the artistic installations so that all concurrent visitors can cooperate on the exploration of the installation.

eGaLab - a new dimension for artists

There is a kind of misunderstanding between the common way of art presentation in galleries and museums and the very emerging artistic forms, directly on electronic media (e.g. net art or virtual sculpture). Though the galleries and museums are getting on-line these days, still they treat the artists and artworks in an old-fashioned way. Even the progressive net-galleries are founded just on a simple point & click navigation which is hostile to both artists and audience. eGaLab (electronic gallery and laboratory) for virtual art reflects todays status under which the artists create and present their artworks. It introduces an intuitive approach in the field of virtual environments and communities oriented to visual arts and artistic collaboration. eGaLab combines and transforms the advantages of collaborative virtual environments with the traditional aspects of artistic creation and presentation. In this paper we describe architecture of the eGaLab platform. We describe its networking part based on a concept of General Variables (GV) and discuss several implementation issues related to its specific character.