Josephine Anstey Eight Seminar AH 563
CAVE, is a recursive acronym - standing for CAVE automatic, virtual environment - standing for CAVE audio visual environment etc - snigger. You're not really, really going to "get" the recursive joke unless you too have struggled with the Towers of Hanoi problem.
Exactly and it also refers to Plato's CAVE in a way that is touchingly humble. We can only see the shadows of "reality" dancing on the wall. But we strive with to use our illusions and reflections to understand and model reality as best we may, a little more deeply eveyday.
Exactly and CAVE also refers to our forebears painting on the walls of our earliest dwellings and although some are left cold by any meditation on CAVE metaphors and metonyms, others will leap on the analogy and run with it....
It takes us back to cave painting and the magical belief that by this act of creation we will exert control over the antelope we paint -when next we hunt we will capture it for sure. So too with the CAVE, we naively and worshipfully believe that we will be able to use it to create and control a better reality.

(Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle - personal conversation - he said something like this!)
I think the notion of a just-distant about to happen future ideal is written all over the CAVE.

Peter Hales, email to Sam Thongrong and students of 563 seminar.
Mething that's it for you, old Chum. You have completed your sentance, your sentiment, your raison d'etre. (Reader at home, did you find my oppositions's sentiment? click here for a Hint. here for the sentance. ) And what a lovely sentiment it was - but now desist, go away and let me continue these thoughts on the CAVE.
Eternally grateful for your input and all that. But now the parallel processing is over. You are taken off-line. I only exist.

The fact is, you were useful at the beginning of this meditation because you helped to illustrate a point that recurs in talking about the CAVE and certainly flavors EVL as a whole. It's the uneasy alliance of the scientist/engineer and the artist.

A mesalliance perhaps. At its best - a mutual respect for the abilities and expertise of the other...

making things look good making things work

    ... at its worst - mutual misunderstanding bordering on contempt

these people are embarrassingly naive about culture, politics, art, the world, life they can't program, can't do math and won't make any money - basically they're pretty irrelevant

Lo, a simmering rift - artisan and artist, realist and idealist, snob and snob, sundered and surrounded by other rifts; knowledge used for competition, power, the put down; EVL "art "judged as glitzy, contentless, technology.

But of course this is not just EVL, its the world - all the struggles about: what is art? what is technology? what are they for? who are they for? who puts value on them? who exploits them? how come they're always ending up in bed together?

Oh - but lets take the case of film. It has evolved long enough so that all aspects of it are fairly well respected and the alliance between art and technology are established comfortably.

To be sure - not everyone's paid the same, and those "in" film and tv are haves compared to all those outside. Those inside create the reality (and we suspect live in it) that we dream of - create among other utopias and dystopias the very "just about to happen" ideal of VR.
The assumption I'm making is that this "just about to happen" ideal exists because at a very real level VR, CAVE VR (and CAVE VR is probably the closest thing to the holodeck ideal!) is stumbling about trying to become. And the people doing it are still trying to figure what works, what can work, whose really doing good, who is all hype.

Lots of ego and distrust and ignorance must be factored in. Lots of bad art and mediocre technology get thrown into the mix and lauded respectively by technocrats and artists, and belittled by artists and technocrats. And all those outside the magic circle wonder why its so bad, are seduced by it wow factor.

Evolution is not instantaneous. The pieces of VR may be here washing around in a primordial soup - but until a large enough group of practitioners are confronted with a large, and sophisticated enough audience (sophisticated because of multiple VR encounters) - VR is simply not here yet. And when it is here I think it will be able to come to grips at least as much as any other media with its own mythology.

 SideBar and Soap Box

One of the most common questions/statements of"real artists" coming to look at theCAVE for the first time is "Why isn't it round - it would be much better."

- and where were you when they were calculating the projection perspectives?

And Inigo says I'd like to do something in the CAVE but I don't want to learn how to program . I work with other technologies and I don't have to learn all the details of them.

But those are established technologies, and artists and artisans have for ages worked out the details of what they can do, could do - and VR and CAVE VR needs that work - needs the loving attention ofthose willing to learn it as deeply as they can.

TOPS TO THE FLOOR.