Scott S. Fisher

Telepresence Master Glove Controller For Dexterous Robotic End-Effectors

This paper describes recent research in the Aerospace Human Factors Research Division at NASAs Ames Research Center to develop a glove-like, control and data-recording device (DataGlove) that records and transmits to a host computerin real time, and at appropriate resolution, a numeric data-record of a users hand/finger shape and dynamics. System configuration and performance specifications are detailed, and current research is discussed investigating its applications in operator control of dexterous robotic end-effectors and for use as a human factors research tool in evaluation of operator hand function requirements and performance in other specialized task environments.

Virtual Explorer: Interactive Virtual Environment for Education

The Virtual Explorer project of the Senses Bureau at the University of California, San Diego, focuses on creating immersive, highly interactive environments for education and scientific visualization which are designed to be educationaland exciting, playful, and enjoyable, as well. We have created an integrated model system on human immunology to demonstrate the application of virtual reality to education, and weve also developed a modular software framework to facilitate the further extension of the Virtual Explorer model to other fields. The system has been installed internationally in numerous science museums, and more than 7,000 individuals have participated in demonstrations. The complete source codewhich runs on a variety of Silicon Graphics computersis available on CD-ROM from the authors.

Virtual environments and interactivity: windows to the future

I really apologize. I promised everyone I would come out wearing the data suit, but it just slipped my mind and I never got around to it. Actually Marvin Minsky was saying that the thing to do would be to come out with nothing on because that would be the perfect interface to the computer. So I kind of shunned the whole thing off at that point.We just heard Nicholas Negroponte ask us -- how do we communicate with computers? Well, thats why this panel is here today. Well be discussing virtual environments and interactivity with some of the people who have been doing a lot of work in this field. I was interviewing a lot of people last night at the parties about virtual environments and I realized that everyone has their own idea of what their virtual environment will be. Some want to interact more, others less. Some want little people running around on the screen bringing them all sorts of messages or images. Well be hearing about a lot of different types of interactivity on our panel today.Id like to point out that Margarets slide should also include the MIT Media Lab as well as UNC.Im going to show some tapes and do some talking later on so Id like start of by introducing Jaron Lanier. Hes the guy with the dreadlocks youve seen at the Silicon Graphics booth. He has an amazing collection of musical instruments from all over the world and when he plays them, he transports you to other times and other places. Hes a designer of programming languages and he started VPL, the company that brought you the glove, Jaron.

Snared illumination

5. References BELL, B. 1980. http://elixir.bu.edu/apr3003/hotspot/photonics.htm KELLER, K. and ACKERMAN, J. 2000 Real-time Structured Light Depth Extraction, Proceedings SPIE EI CURRAN, S. et al 1990 Critical flicker fusion in normal elderly subjects; A cross-sectional community study. Current Psychology: Research & Reviews, 9(1), 25-34.

Intelligent virtual worlds continue to develop

Weve always imagined that the computer could become a fantastic tool for building real-time virtual worlds. Early examples were compelling until we realized that, no matter how many polygons and tex tu res were included, there needed to be more to it than just endlessly navigating around a static 3D space at 30fps. Next step? Add in AI,Artificial Life,Avatars... The vision of combining these capabilit/es in various permutations to create evolving, in teract ive, computer-generated v i r tua l worlds and populating them is slowly coming into focus. Invested with new dimensions of symbolism and meaning as these wor lds begin to extend the i r presence throughout our digital network, theyre gradually approaching the kind of fantastic animated cybernetic systems described by science fiction wr i ter Orson Scott Card in his Ender Wiggins Series: intel l igent virtual worlds that respond to the user and persist through a lifetime, A critical challenge in the elaboration of these intelligent virtual worlds wil l be the development of environments that are as unpredictable and rich in interconnected processes as an actual location. And, in addition, their virtual inhabitants will need to be smart enough to learn about the user and to evolve accordingly. As always, these developments have been pioneered through the disparate efforts of many, including Karl Sims, Pattie t4aes, Joe Bates Woggtes World, Naoko Tosas Neurobaby, and of course, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneaus interactive environments (to name just a few). In this column, we take a glimpse at three unique intelligent virtual worlds. Were not trying to present a comprehensive past, present and future of the area but rather than focusing on a single project, we want to present a broad range of developments.We want to give some sense of the diversity, richness and exciting possibilities offered by interactive artificial worlds. First we present Menagerie, a project from Telepresence Research that was an early effort to develop an interactive virtual world that responded to the users activities in real time. Originally commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1992, Menagerie was also the first immersive virtual environment experience to be exhibited in a major public art museum. Secondly, we present Rebecca Allens virtual environment framework, Emergence. This system generates an active, responsive, networked virtual world that provides the basis for an artistic installation piece entitled The Bush Soul, to be shown as part of the SIGGRAPH 98 Interact ive A r t i Emerging Technologies exhibition. Gravity is a 2S-person San Francisco based software company with roots in virtual reality that develops breakthrough 3D technology and applications.Their Terra software offers the user a beautiful, organic, dreamlike world to explore. In our final section, Zak Zaidrnan one of Grevicys founders presents this fascinating new project. For additional perspectives on these exciting new developments, the 13th Biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is sponsoring a special Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Environments in Brighton, U.K., this summer. For more information, see h t t p : l l w w w . s a l f o r d. a c. u k l i t i l r s a l eca i i ve .h tml . And finally, we are always looking for interesting projects and ideas to present in future columns. If you are involved in an interesting real-rime interactive project chat you think might be suitable for our column, please contact one (or both) of us.

Virtual explorer : Creating interactive 3D virtual environments for education

The Virtual Explorer project at the University of California, San Diego, is creating immersive, highly- interactive virtual environments for scientific visualization and education. We are creating an integrated model system to demonstrate the potential applications of VR in the educational arena, and are also developing a modulator software framework for the further development of the Virtual Explorer model for other fields.

Real-time interactive graphics in computer gaming

It is difficult to ignore the excitement in the computer gaming community about real-time 3D graphics. Everywhere, the talk seems to be of faster 3D engines -of hardware acceleration, texture-mapping and advanced realtime lighting effects. As computer graphics hardware gets more powerful and more accessible, game developers are realizing a wider range of expressive possibilities. And every year, we see progressively more realistic virtual worlds packaged in game form. But the quest for realism and the creation of convincing %vorlds is not only about fancy graphics. Just as important (perhaps even more important) are how the player interacts with the world and shares experiences with its virtual residents. Real-time interaction can take many forms. Perhaps many of us are mosr inclined to think of high-speed Quakestyle shoot-era-ups as the most advanced interactive games available today.These games certainly test our split-second reflexes and fast-twitch muscle tissues. Through networked playing modes, these games also provide us with a means of interacting (killing, more often than not) and communicating (Die, scum!) with other real people, inside the artificial world. Of course, not all real-time games that feature strong interaction with other people are of this genre. For many years, text-based virtual worlds -such as Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and MUD, Object Oriented (MOOs) -have been allowing people to role-play and interact with one another via the interface of an on-line, virtual persona or avatar. Some of these have been essentially chat rooms, while many others take on more game-like qualities, with virtual places to explore and hurdles to overcome. More recently, these elaborate interactive communities have gone graphical. For this issues column, we are glad to welcome Amy Jo Kim. A leading on-line design specialist, Amy has been designing innovative user interfaces for more than 15 years, and her background broadly spans such areas as on-line gaming worlds and multimedia user interfaces. With the introduction of games such as Origins Ul~ma Online, we are starting to find some really large-scale virtual worlds being built, on top of a rich, graphical, gaming framework. In a section of her upcoming book, Commun~-Euilding on the Web (due our in lace summer 199B from PeachPit Press), Amy examines this new generation of highlyresponsive, ever-evolving game worlds. In this column, we present an adapted excerpt from her book, which takes U~ma Online as a specific example, and discusses some of the successes and failures of that game.

Real-time interactive graphics

For many of us, virtual reality is most likely to bring to mind commercial applications in industry or entertainment. However, its encouraging to be reminded that it is also being used towards other some might say nobler ends. One such application is the preservation and recreation of cultural and natural sites around the world. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)World Heritage program is charged with protecting such sites. There are many ongoing efforts to use interactive visual and sometimes immersive computer technologies to help in this effort. In this issue, we are pleased to have Scot Refsland, Executive Officer of the International Society on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia (VSMM) present an overview of nine projects in this area. The projects he describes like the people involved in them are widely spread across the globe. They represent a good cross-section of the diverse work thats being done to help catalogue and preserve these heritage sites, and to educate people about them. In some cases, the work is primarily intended to document the sites and thereby to help protect and maintain them for the future. Other projects use amusement park ride-style experiences to entertain and educate people at the same time. And, while virtual reality technology is certainly not intended to replace these sites (nor could it be expected to), it can allow people to gain a better appreciation and understanding of those locations that they cannot visit directly.

Real-time interactive graphics: taking location-based entertainment to the next level

Within the spectrum of application areas making use of interactive, real-time graphics techniques, entertainment applications are probably the ones most visible and accessible to the public. With in rhe entertainment sector, there are various manifestations computer and arcade games are surely the most commonplace examples. So-called location-based entertainment centers may involve high-quality computer graphics, but they tend co be prerendered rather than generated in real time. Although they may be made to appear responsive, the interaction is generally limited to passively being josded around in a motion platform there is rarely any a~ve interaction whatsoever. However, an emerging phenomenon in the entertainment sector may be set ro redefine the location-based entertainment categorization. The idea is certainly location-based (that is, you need to go there to experience it), and ic is certainly devoted to entertainment. But the interaction is real, the choice of experiences is diverse and the target audience is very broad. In the summer of 1998, Disney inaugurated a site and a multitude oF experiences that they col lect ively call DisneyQuest_ It may be argued that this is nor the first attempt of its kind. but the array of interactive experiences offered is wider, and the scale and quality of the production is probably higher than ha~ been seen before. In this column, we are pleased to have Joseph Garlington of Walt Disney Imagineering offer us an overview of DisneyQuest. For those who have yet to experience it firsthand, he gives us some idea of what it is (or rather, what it isnt), describes some of the interactive experiences available and finally talks about some of the challenges encountered in producing the experiences.

The virtual brewery adventure

Introduction The Virtual Brewery Adventure is an immersive virtual environment experience developed for Sapporo Beer of Japan.The exhibit is permanently installed in the Visitors Center of Sapporos new corporate headquarters located in the Yebisu Garden Place Development in the Ebisu area of Tokyo on the site of Sapporos original Yebisu Brewery built in 1887. The virtual brewery has been open to the general public six days a week since the complex opened in October 1994 and in the two years since, it has hosted more than 1.5 million visitors (see Figure I). Sapporo contacted Telepresence Research in the fall of 1993 for preliminary negotiations and storyboard planning. By April 1994, after the experience content was agreed upon, the firms signed a formal agreement for the project implementat ion. Four months later Telepresence delivered the hardware and software, and spent a month in Tokyo installing everything.Telepresence Research produced, directed and designed the brewerys virtual world.The company drew on the expertise of its strategic alliance for help with the sound system, graphics and interactive viewing platform (the project team included Fakespace, Crystal River Engineering, Silicon Graphics and Magic Box Productions). The team for the project was small, especially given the very ambitious schedule and complexity of the installation. Scott Fisher, founder and head of Telepresence Research, acted as producer and director for the Virtual Brewery Adventure; VR and installation artist Perry Hoberman was the artistic director; the virtual worlds software was designed by Glen Fraser; Bay-area musician MarkTrayle designed the audio samples and overall sonic environment, while the audio software was developed by Toni Schneider of Crystal River Engineering and Fraser.