"Rutopia2" is a virtual reality art project describing a magic garden with interactive sculptural trees that branches to distant worlds and transverse them into a shared network community. The trees are flexible with dynamic architectural structures based on a singular module - a rectangular screen. As the user approaches the trees they automatically grow. Once fully grown, the screens turn into windows and show views to other worlds. The users can look through the screens to see distant environments just like we can look through a window and see the outside. In virtual reality VR, these windows cross traditional borders of segregated proximities to link the future, the past, the present, the close, the distant, the public and the individual in real time. Thus the garden becomes a communal hybrid of transdisciplinary nature propagating shared telecommunication and collaboration. Its fluent formations are an open source for learning, entertainment, and creativity and allow users to navigate the development of their own experiences.  

"Rutopia2" combines Russian folkloric structures with futuristic technological paraphernalia. Arthur Clarke, the renowned science fiction writer once said that sufficiently complex technology was indistinguishable from magic. The garden embodies an unattainable world of harmony, based upon folk utopian idealism and a projection design of the future. "Rutopia2" continues to research the aesthetics of virtual art in its relationship with the art of painting and Russian folk arts, such as wood sculpture, traditional toys and decorative painting. In addition, the development of tile display devices/systems and their potential, such as high-resolution, segmentation, modularity, and parallel computing, contributed in the conceptualization of "Rutopia2".

The navigation and interaction of "Rutopia2" is based on the participant proximity to responding objects and interactive areas. The wand interface is used only to control the direction of the movement. The negation of the buttons in the wand interface forces intuitive navigation in the virtual world. The goal is to avoid the preliminary instructions usually required to familiarize the user with virtual environment and its rules of exploration. During the IGRID Conference the first version of the rpoejct showcased two interconnected worlds - the island world and the house world. In the island world the users could grow 3 trees and each tree consists of about 40-50 segment-windows. Once the trees are fully-grown, their windows turn on and the island changes its mode from monochrome to color. Participants could view the remote house world by moving close to the windows and peeking into the details of the distant house. By moving through the window, viewers enter the remote house world where they could explore the house, trees, road, and other objects, traditional in Russian fairytales and folk art. The segments of the trees could be reassembled in different ways through rotations or flips, put together or taken apart similar to tangram puzzle. The linked worlds are projected into screens of the trees with high resolution of details. Looking closer in the structural tree windows allow participants to observe the details of the remote worlds.

The windows of the trees were made possible by using the new Ygdrasil node stencilBuffer. The stencil buffer node acts as a mask covering the areas outside the windows so that only the selected window area allows a view to the other world. The other world consists of two equal parts, the distant part and the close part. The distant part is the remote place where the user goes through the window. The close part is next to the window, and is covered by the stencil buffer mask so that the user can see only the portion of it through the hole of the window. Each third window-hole on the tree was connected to the same view of the house world using alternating repetition. Participants could recognize and visually connect lower and upper parts of the remote house world projected on the different level windows to get an even broader view of the remote environment.