The VR project Fulfillment: a field guide to the logistical city, is a multi-year research project developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in collaboration with the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago. The project was enabled through a unique collaboration between anthropologists, designers, and other social scientists from several research institutions spanning the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with support from the National Science Foundation. This proposal is for a public exhibition of the Fulfillment project in the CAVE2 VR Environment as part of the Demos and Exhibitions track during the ACM Hypertext 2025 Conference in Chicago to be held September 15-18. 
Project Fulfillment brings VR technology to the forefront of anthropological research to engage participants in guided first-hand observation of the hidden aspects of logistics and the behind-the-scenes effects of supply chain capitalism on ecology, labor and socio-economic well-being. This immersive experience unfolds the increasingly pervasive yet often obscured ways in which the infrastructural and operative dimensions of commercial logistics are reshaping the way we work, live, and relate to each other and to our environments. 
Participants enter a virtual narrative environment by initially selecting an object of &ldquo;fulfillmentrdquo; from an online graphic display (GUI) of everyday consumer items - such as a teddy bear, stationery, or a healthcare product. The selection of the item serves as an entry point into a deeper exploration of the hidden costs and consequences of commercial logistics. Using a button-equipped wand in the immersive CAVE2 VR system, participants navigate through ten interconnected scenes - including a cityscape, data center, warehouse zones, modern cemetery, prairie land, and military ruins - each revealing layers of ecological, social, historical, and economic entanglements that shape global supply chains. 
Interactive objects embedded within each scene act like hyperlinks: when activated, they visually tear open the environment to expose new narratives and landscapes connected to the selected item, inviting participants to reflect on the often-invisible infrastructures and labor that sustain contemporary consumer worlds. This immersive system transforms data-driven insights from fieldwork and archival research into ethnographic spatial storytelling, giving multi-sensorial form to complex systems and fostering critical reflection on the ethics and impacts of global commerce. 
Through this project, we seek to illuminate the hidden dimensions of global supply chain infrastructures - tracing their profound effects on labor, consumption, well-being, and ecological systems. By leveraging the immersive power of virtual reality, Fulfillment not only expands the methodological toolkit of anthropological fieldwork but also enhances public engagement with complex, often obscured, socio-technical systems. This work catalyzes interdisciplinary collaboration across anthropology, design, science, and engineering, while fostering novel multi-modal pathways for educating emerging scholars and engaging broader public beyond academia. Ultimately, the project lays the groundwork for a more inclusive and sensorially rich future for anthropological research, its collaborative possibilities, broader impact, and accessibility.

VR project &ldquo;Fulfillment: a field guide to the logistical city&rdquo;

You Can Grow Here: A Therapeutic VR Journey for Anxiety Management is an immersive VR experience developed for the CAVE2&trade; environment, aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Good Health and Well-Being. In response to the mental health challenges intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, the project explores how interactive storytelling, ambient sound, and 3D typography can support emotional reflection and teach anxiety coping strategies. Built in Unity with custom assets from Blender and Maya, the experience differs from most clinical VR programs, allowing users to independently explore emotions, manage anxiety, and practice evidence-based calming techniques within a safe, narrative-driven space that builds emotional resilience. 
The project was developed by UIC CS+DES students Gaeun Lee, Hope Jo, Cindy Nakhammouane, and CS student Khin Yuupar Myat in the CS/DES 427/450 Creative Coding course, taught by Professors Daria Tsoupikova and Mike Papka with support from TA Hal Brynteson.

Participant interacting with &ldquo;You Can Grow Here&rdquo;

You Can Grow Here: A Therapeutic VR Journey for Anxiety Management

Written and programmed for EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2 by UIC Masters of Design student Quentin Bu, &ldquo;Elegy&rdquo; is a highly experimental virtual reality work, merging the artist&rsquo;s original poetry and audio composition, graphic design, 3D typography and physical computing activated through participant movement and gestures. Created as Bu&rsquo;s Masters thesis - Elegy uniquely combines performance art with virtual reality. 
To escape, to free, to grow, to part, to forget, to recall, is to reorganize and make choices about what to let go of and what to hold on to, and it is to physically leave a place and move far away without knowing if you&rsquo;ll find a way back. 
Writing is my emotional conduit, for the moments when strong emotions have nowhere else to flow: whether it&rsquo;s journaling, composing bad poetry, scribbling on an airplane sickness bag, jotting down stream of consciousness, or repeating phrases in my head while wandering around unfamiliar streets. The Elegy is my poetic, perhaps futile attempt to consolidate and immortalize the transitory states of life. 
My design methods include object-making, working with restrictions, experimenting with technology, and exploring metaphors. An Elegy for the Departed is a culmination of my creative endeavors with the media to realize them. 
The Elegy is also a technological experiment. It is a performance using wearable technology to track body movements, connecting the physical body with a virtual digital metaphor for a body. What does typography in virtual reality spaces look like? How can I best use the technology I&rsquo;ve developed to effectively tell a story?

Elegy in EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2

An Elegy for the Departed - an Interactive Virtual Reality+Physical Computing Typographic Performance

A collaboration of the UIC, Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Design Archive (CDA), the &ldquo;Chicago Design Through the Decades&rdquo; project is a swift exciting journey through the history of Chicago design over the last one hundred years with content based on resources from the collection of the CDA. Following engaging characters and textual tidbits found in design works held in the archive, the journey begins in the 1920s with the era&rsquo;s painterly and illustrative techniques, evolves through the decades, and ends in the 2010s with digital rendering using AI and machine learning (ML)-technologies becoming increasingly prevalent in the contemporary landscape. At once nostalgic and whimsical, both humorous and sobering moments abound through the decades. 
The project will be showcased as part of <a href="https://artonthemart.com/">Art onTheMart</a> with previews this summer and an official opening on November 17th. 
The Chicago Design Archive is an exclusive and permanent online record of Chicago design currently holding over 3200 examples of work by over 1100 designers. 
As designers and educators, Daria Tsoupikova, Sharon Oiga and Guy Villa Jr lead a team of creators and archivists whose overarching goal is to increase the understanding and appreciation of Chicago design history and to contribute to the recognition of Chicago as an international modern design center through their use of innovative technologies. 
The project team consists of the following individuals: 
Daria Tsoupikova, UIC School of Design & EVL 
Sharon Oiga, UIC School of Design & CDA 
Guy Villa Jr, Columbia College Chicago 
Krystofer Kim, NASA 
Fabio Miranda, UIC Computer Science & EVL 
Jack Weiss, CDA 
Cheri McIntyre, CDA 
Lauren Meranda, CDA 
Louis Schwadron, Sky White Sound

Work by Choral, Marlena Novak & Jay Yim as part of Art onTheMart

Chicago Design Through the Decades

Kyra Jones, School of Design undergraduate student created a virtual reality environment for the CAVE2 &ldquo;TRNQWRLD&rdquo; under the supervision of EVL faculty and Design Professor Daria Tsoupikova. Using Unity and the Unity simulator for the CAVE2 developed by EVL PhD candidate Arthur Nishimoto, Jones was able to learn the software, create the models and develop a robust, highly engaging virtual reality application over a few short weeks. 
 Using an abstracted, yet familiar environment, TRNQWRLD aims to let the viewer experience nature up close. The user can interact with the animals in the space by simply walking towards them. The animals wait in an idle animation until the player gets close enough to trigger a reaction. Some animals have peaceful reactions, while others go into a defensive state. 
The colors of the environment were chosen because of it’s calming color palette. Jones&rsquo; research of calming colors resulted in using a color scheme of an early morning sunrise over a lake. The blues and pinks are soft enough to not disturb the sense of tranquility in the world. All of the models used are low-poly, geometric models. The goal was to create a cohesive world, much like our natural world, but with its own visual language. 
The colors found in nature were skewed, so the viewer could have a familiar yet distant sense when entering TRNQWRLD. The colors/patterns of the animals were realistic to create harmony between the color palettes used. 
Animals have proven to be helpful in stressful situations. By having minimal interaction with animals, along with an unimaginable environment filled with peaceful sounds and colors, TRNQWRLD intends to relieve stress from everyday life. TRNQWRLD started as an idea to bring stress-relieving pets to those unable to have animal companions due to living situations. The project then evolved to presenting nature through a different lens. While there is still a sense of peace and tranquility, TRNQWRLD ultimately brings the wonders of nature to the viewer three-dimensionally.

TRNQWRLD

Transforming Storytelling: Multiuser Virtual Reality Theater for Collaborative Tele-Immersive Interaction (aka &ldquo;Hummignbird&rdquo;) is a collaborative project between the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the <a href="https://www.goodmantheatre.org/">Goodman Theatre</a>. Led by Daria Tsoupikova, professor of the UIC School of Design in conjunction with Goodman&rsquo;s Jo Cattell, &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; is a multiuser theatrical performance that merges real and virtual worlds with the goal of encouraging stronger theatrical engagement with a tech-savvy younger generation audience. 
The project is being designed for the Goodman Theater New Stages, which showcases innovative and experimental theater works. Chicago youth will experience &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; by attending tele-immersive real-time performances running concurrently at the Goodman Theatre&rsquo;s Alice Rapport Center and EVL&rsquo;s Continuum smart space. 
&ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; performers will take theatergoers on a tele-immersive journey donning virtual reality head-mounted displays and interacting with the virtual environment to tell a story via this new medium. 
Performances are anticipated for mid-2021 pending pandemic regulations and clearances.
See a video excerpt of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yorUSe_2-Kc&t=7s">&ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; on YouTube</a>.

Performers Interact with a &ldquo;Hummingbird&rdquo; Virtual Scene

Hummingbird: Collaborative Virtual Reality for Tele-Immersive Interactive Theater

This project&rsquo;s purpose was to investigate the ability of virtual reality to teach music. An application was developed for the CAVE2&trade; and Microsoft Hololens, and their ability to teach music effectively was analyzed. Both the applications teach the user how to play &rsquo;Mary Had a Little Lamb&rsquo;on the viola, and each virtual reality platform had itrsquo;s own benefits and drawbacks. An interface was created for both platforms that shows the user the correct bow direction, tempo, fingering, and sheet music. Additional features included adjustable tempo and a metronome that can be turned on and off. The application was helpful since the user could get visual cues from the graphics while still keeping an eye on his/her instrument. Future goals for the application include songs that can be uploaded by the user, microphone input, more instruments, and better graphics. The results of this research show that music instruction is a viable possibility in a virtual reality environment and will spark developers and musicians to work together to further explore this field. 
YouTube video of Microsoft Hololens version of this application: 
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Tv2SavmbDVg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> 
YouTube video of CAVE2 version of the application: 
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RZg9cfZYQqU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Shreyas Mohan in CAVE2 using the viola instruction virtual/augmented reality application he developed during his 2016 summer internship at EVL.

Music Instruction in a Virtual/Augmented Environment

Despite much progress and increased interest, mixed reality applications are not yet in widespread use by the general public. Our framework, DigitalQuest, facilitates the creation of mixed reality applications, providing application designers with the ability to add custom virtual content to the real world. Specifically it supports the creation of futuristic &ldquo;scavenger hunts&rdquo;, where multiple users search for virtual objects positioned in the real world, and where each object is related to a riddle or a challenge to be solved. Each player can compete with the other participants by finding virtual objects and solving puzzles, thereby unlocking additional challenges. Virtual objects are represented by animated 3D meshes locked to a determined position in the real world. The objects are activated when a player gets within a proximity threshold and then taps the object on the screen of his or her mobile phone. In our demonstration application, configurable virtual content appears, followed bya question that must be answered in order to be pass to the next challenge. The displayed content may consist of images, video and audio streams, graphical effects, or a text message that provides hints on how to advance in the game. The editor makes it easy to create puzzles that can be solved by exploring the surroundings of the virtual object in order to discover clues and making use of location-specific knowledge. When a participant figures out the correct solution, he or she scores points related to the complexity of the challenge and also unlocks remaining puzzles that cause new virtual object to appear in the world. At the end of the event, the player with more points wins. 
DigitalQuest provides a general approach for adding user-defined virtual content to the real world, allowing the personalization of a &ldquo;mirror world&rdquo; that could be explored by anyone with a GPS-enabled mobile device simply by using our application. Though these Quests were originally meant for creative exploration and mixed reality scavenger hunts, our framework also could potentially support a wide range of applications, for example: team building and team-work enhancement events, tourism, virtual galleries, and cultural heritage. As we demonstrate in our case study, DigitalQuest can also be used to create augmented narratives, engaging users by telling an interactive story that makes use of real-world architecture. We also believe that our framework could be used to provide context-aware opportunities for learning. DigitalQuest could additionally be used for marketing purposes, allowing companies to organize events with customized content in order to make customers more attached to the brand. Ultimately, the framework is meant to provide a way for designers to flexibly express creative approaches to generating virtual content within the real-world.

A sample camera view of the mobile application showing the user arriving in proximity of a virtual object. The on-screen buttons provide user interaction; the upper-left bar provides a score and the current GPS accuracy.

DigitalQuest: A Mixed Reality Approach to Scavenger Hunts

This research explores a novel approach to the design of Mixed Reality (MR) applications, which combines elements from markerless and location-based Augmented Reality in order to explore new types of interaction, leveraging a spatial representation of virtual content. In particular, a method is derived for developing both a mobile application, that can be used by people to see augmented content in the real world, and an editor application, which can be used to design and create MR experiences. Currently available mobile technologies needed to achieve these results are exploited, and the integration of sensors in order to improve tracking with a fully location-based approach, in which every content has a defined position in real space is explored. The advantages and the new interaction possibilities enabled by this method are weighed, in order to define the requirements for a custom MR authoring tool and its implementation. Particular emphasis is placed on the mapping between real-world and virtual coordinates and on the possibilities enabled by real-time editing, which allows the designer to preview the MR experience and also to interact with users.

Case Study - Overlaying Historical Photos

Merging Worlds: A Location-based Approach to Mixed Reality

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is a 3D narrative experience made for the effective sensory environment of the EVL&rsquo;s CAVE2&trade; that gives voice to stories of violence and the post-traumatic stress experienced by ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. During the American-led counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after September 11, 2001, the torture and abuse of detainees was a commonplace tactic. Hearts and Minds: the Interrogations Project is based on interviews of American soldiers conducted by Dr. John Tsukayama. Viewers travel through the domestic spaces and surreal interior landscapes of soldiers who have come home transformed by these experiences, triggering their testimonies by interacting with objects laden with loss. 
Hearts and Minds is developed by a team including filmmaker Roderick Coover, writer Scott Rettberg, artist and visualization researcher Daria Tsoupikova, computer scientist Arthur Nishimoto, sound designer Mark Partridge, production assistant Mark Baratta, and senior research programmer Lance Long. Dr. Jeffrey Stevenson Murer of St. Andrews University, Scotland also contributed as a consultant on the project. EVL, the UIC Department of Art and Design, Temple University, and the Norwegian Research Council supported the development of the project. 
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/274777151" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Video documentation excerpt from Hearts and Minds performance in the CAVE2 virtual environment at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

&ldquo;Hearts and Minds&rdquo; in the CAVE2&trade;

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project

As a demonstration of cultural heritage, participants can view 360-degree panoramic images of Medinet Habu, the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III located on the West Bank of Luxor in Egypt, in the CAVE2&trade; System. The 360-degree photographic images were taken by Tom DeFanti of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at University of California, San Diego, on April 30, 2011, with the assistance of Adel Saad and Greg Wickham of King Abdullah University for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, using the CAVEcam camera developed by Dick Ainsworth, Dan Sandin, and Tom DeFanti. Images were stitched together by Dick Ainsworth. Calit2&rsquo;s CalVR software is used to display the panoramic image in the CAVE2.

A view of a site in Luxor, Egypt in the CAVE2.

Luxor

In an homage to &ldquo;StarTrek,&rdquo; EVL graduate student Arthur Nishimoto spent his spare time over the past two years creating a 3D virtual replica of the starship Enterprise. Participants can wander through various rooms inside the ship, and then exit the ship to explore the docking station. Nishimoto created all interior room models, and ported the Enterprise&rsquo;s exterior model, developed by Dennis Baily and converted to Blender by Eric Clark, to the CAVE2&trade; System. EVL&rsquo;s OmegaLib software is used to display the 3D model in the CAVE2. 
For more detail about the history and development of &ldquo;The Enterprise in Virtual Reality&rdquo; - from learning Blender and Unity thru implementation see <a href="http://enterprisevr.blogspot.com/">Arthur Nishimoto&rsquo;s blog</a>. 
Credits 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Special thanks to Arthur Nishimoto, Dennis Baily and Eric Clark.

A view from outside the starship Enterprise as displayed in the CAVE2

StarTrek Enterprise

Content and application programming: Dan Sandin 
Content and systems programming: Robert Kooima 
Music and sound effects: Laurie Spiegel 
Driver: Tom DeFanti 

The virtual-reality installation &ldquo;Particle Dreams in Spherical Harmonics&rdquo; is the latest of a series of VR art installations created by Dan Sandin and collaborators to involve the viewer-participant in the creation of an immersive, visual and sonic experience. It is based on the physical simulation of over one million particles with momentum and elastic reflection in an environment with gravity. In the final scene there is a very realistic rendering of water with reflections, and lighting based on spherical harmonics. The sound components are triggered and modified by the user and particle interaction. This work was premiered in January 2011 at the gallery@calit2 University of California San Diego, designed for exhibition in the Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego division of Calit2&rsquo;s StarCAVE and the CAVE2&trade; developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago. 

According to Amos Jessup, standing in the StarCAVE &ldquo;was like standing in a rainstorm made of rainbow fragments, with the power to guide the storm by hand. It was unsettling, out-of-body, very trippy stuff, a powerful artistic experience. The sounds, in small fragments like the rainbows, seemed to be natural concomitants of the gestures, even though you could tell it was not through a mechanical linkage, a theremin or one of its descendants. But whatever the linkage was it managed to be sensitive, or else it was just inherent in the genius of the sounds that they seemed that way.&rdquo; 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/dan/">Daniel J. Sandin</a> is an internationally recognized pioneer of electronic art and visualization. He is director emeritus of the Electronic Visualization Lab and a professor emeritus in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is continuing his professional activities with Tom DeFanti at Calit2, UCSD. As an artist, he has exhibited worldwide, and has received grants in support of his work from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His video animation Spiral PTL is in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 
In 1969, Sandin developed a computer-controlled light and sound environment, called Glow Flow, at the Smithsonian Institution and was invited to join the art faculty at the University of Illinois the same year. By 1973 he had developed the Sandin Image Processor, a highly programmable analog computer for processing video images in real time. He then worked with DeFanti to combine the Image Processor with real-time computer graphics and performed visual concerts, the Electronic Visualization Events, with synthesized musical accompaniment. In 1991, Sandin and DeFanti conceived and developed, in collaboration with graduate students, the CAVE virtual-reality (VR) theater. 
In recent years, Sandin has been concentrating on the development of auto stereo VR displays (i.e., free viewing, no glasses), and on the creation of network-based tele-collaborative VR art works that involve video camera image materials, rich human interaction and mathematical systems. 
Robert Kooima began collaborating with Sandin and DeFanti while a doctoral student at EVL between 2004 and 2008. Kooima&rsquo;s work, research and teaching focus on interactive 3D computer graphics, scientific visualization, game development, and stereographic display technology. 
Laurie Spiegel, composer, software creator and visual artist, is known widely for her pioneering work with many early analog and digital electronic music systems, including the GROOVE system at Bell Telephone Labs, and Music Mouse, a softwarebased musical instrument for Macintosh, Atari and Amiga. Her realization of Kepler&rsquo;s &ldquo;Harmony of the Planets&rdquo; was included on the Voyager Spacecraft’s &ldquo;Sounds of Earth&rdquo; gold record. Often praised for her integration of intellect and intuition, she has taught at Cooper Union and NYU. Spiegel currently lives and works in a large, semi-raw loft in lower Manhattan and in cyberspace. 
Tom DeFanti, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). 
DeFanti is an internationally recognized expert in computer graphics since the early 1970s. He has amassed a number of credits, including: use of his lab&rsquo;s hardware and software for the computer animation sequence produced for the 1977 Star Wars movie; recipient of the 1988 ACM Outstanding Contribution Award; and appointed an ACM Fellow in 1994. He also shares recognition, with EVL director Daniel J. Sandin, for conceiving the CAVE virtual-reality theater in 1991. 
Striving for more than a decade to connect high-resolution visualization and virtual-reality devices over long distances, DeFanti has collaborated with Larry Smarr, Maxine Brown, Joe Mambretti, Tomonori Aoyama, and Kees Neggers to lead state, national and international teams to build the most advanced, production-quality networks available to scientists, with major NSF funding.

Sandin&rsquo;s Particle Dreams

Particle Dreams in Spherical Harmonics

Sudden Loss is a projected software work created with Processing. 

At the beginning of the ideation portion of this project, I became intrigued by the notion of a single primitive 3d form multiplied over a large architectural space. The cube, as it is represented in Sudden Loss, is multiplied such that the projected surface of the Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery becomes a single low-resolution membrane. In certain modes of the piece, the cubes are enlarged voxels, or 3d pixels. Algorithms that mimic natural movements, such as waves, are passed to the array of cubes, causing phenomenon of undulating movements and moir&eacute; patterns. In other modes of Sudden Loss, the character of the cube is multiplied into itself, generating a recursive form that resolves as an ever changing, multifaceted hypercube. 

The various states of Sudden Loss are generated in real-time using software, as opposed to traditional playback of a time-based work that has been previously created, edited and recorded. Based on the time of day or night, the piece changes dramatically every hour - each of these larger changes is augmented subtly throughout the 60 minutes of each hour. Duration is another point of investigation with this piece; the overall duration is seven hours, which is beyond the scope of most works of film or video. The implications of this duration is that the viewer cannot get a true sense of the work in its entirety without multiple visits or an extended time spent in the gallery.

Sudden Loss

The Fall Beyond Tomorrow&rsquo;s Life is an interactive environment that unites water and sound. The primary components of the piece are a horizontal volume of water, a hexagonal multichannel speaker array, a multichannel audio interface and a computer vision apparatus. The computer vision component, which consists of (6) infrared (IR) emitters, an IR camera and a computer, are positioned above the volume of water and are used to capture the motion of any object that interacts with the surface of the water. The motion of this interaction, and the resultant waves, are captured by the IR camera and translated into spatialized sound by the software running on the computer. The volume of water is an analogue of the room in which it is placed - interaction in specific areas of the volume cause sounds in a similar area of the room. 

The impetus of this project was the investigation of water as a novel interface. Although impractical from the viewpoint of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), water is inextricably tied to human existence and therefore holds the potential of a unique membrane of interaction. Our bodies are composed largely of it and life on Earth cannot exist without it: in abundance it is life-giving and too great an overabundance or scarcity of it is death. It has alternately symbolized life, love, death, rebirth and renewal in myriad cultures since the dawn of mankind, and is never far from anyone&rsquo;s conscious mind in this era of mass environmental concern. I seek to create an environment that has at its focus a volume of water, which the viewer encounters with little or no added artifice. When the viewer disturbs the surface of the water, or even bends over to look into it, sounds resonate accordingly.

Reception: The Fall Beyond Tomorrow&rsquo;s Life

The Fall Beyond Tomorrow&rsquo;s Life

Grav Weldon&rsquo;s MFA thesis research Meridianus Divinitus is an exploration of the body energetic. It is a set of dynamic reinterpretations of chakra and meridian flows recreated to emulate aspects of the five ancient sacred elements - Earth, air, fire, water and spirit. The base simulation from which these five animations were generated was created from a system of rules determining the direction in which the individual particle systems would flow. These rules were derived from charts used for acupuncture and acupressure. Two types of particle flows were utilized to create the overall simulations. Chakras used interdependent forces while the meridians used a system of independent overlapping linear forces flowing in positions and directions determined by the information acquired from Weldon&rsquo;s research. Once the simulation was complete, manifestations were then designed for the individual elements. 

For Earth, sand was used to create single polygon sprites, which were then rendered as a group of individual grains of sand using surface shaders with alpha channels. Air used simple primitive spheres with complex shaders based on several types of noise to give the appearance of nebular gas. As the spheres overlapped each other with the varied opacity noise they gave an illusion of cloud formations. A similar solution was used to create fire. In addition to using noise-controlled opacity, a xray shader algorithm coupled with waveform displacement shaders were used. For Water an entirely different approach was taken; each particle was replaced by a metaball. Metaballs simulate liquid by using surface tension expression. Once the forms were derived from this, glass shaders were applied to create the end result. Spirit uses the same methodology as sand created for Earth. Photographs of individual flower petals were stamped onto sections of nurb spheres to simulate the curvature that most flower petals possess.

Water Still from Meridianus Divinitus

Meridianus Divinitus

Instant Copies is a virtual world immersive environment that plays with the anachronistic concept of xerographic copy machines in a virtual milieu. Invented in 1942 by American inventor Chester Carlson, xerography (electrophotography) combines photography with a dry printing process using light and electricity to charge a surface to attract toner particles creating a facsimile image. Carlson&rsquo;s initial invention was cumbersome, but was developed into a marketable pushbutton machine by Halide (later renamed Xerox) in 1960. Carlson&rsquo;s xerography machine was the solution for instant reproduction of documents without liquids or odorous chemicals associated with photography. 

Instant Copies has as its central feature several interactive virtual copy machines that actually work. Any image dropped onto a copy machine is instantly mapped into a paper-like object. Copies fall out of the machine and onto the floor, making a temporary mess and then disappear with a timed disintegration script. Two cyberzine machines function as exquisite corpse devices, allowing users to add to and change a preexisting zine like objects. 

The Instant Copies environment is a showcase for copier art and zines that flourished in the late 80&rsquo;s and early 90&rsquo;s. This will includes various counterculture and underground press groups, alternative art publishing and artist books, artist magazines, assembling magazines, punk zines, mail art and the DIY movement. The Instant Copies environment will also include information about and links to relevant sources on the subject of the science of the xerographic process, the biography of Chester Carlson. This information is in the form of interactive exhibit and magazine-like virtual objects mounted in the virtual space. 

An opening for the Instant Copies space was advertised with xerographic flyers and in virtual communities. You can visit Instant Copies in Second Life at I Am Columbia sim.

Instant Copies

The Viewer consists on a virtual viewer situated in front of the real viewer, and deals with the visualization and comprehension strategies of the work of art. It presents an interactive device that establishes a relation of visual communication with the audience, showing how the viewer acts in relation to the art piece. 

The Viewer deals with the artwork-viewer communication through a direct and simple, but at the same time extreme interaction, as the only activity the virtual viewer performs is to observe the public around him, controlling them visually, reproducing audience behavior. 

The project tries to invert the usual artwork-viewer relation, being in this case the piece who watches the audience, making them to become aware of their own behavior. 

<a href='http://www.casildasanchez.net'>More information on collaborating artist Casilda Sanchez</a>

Virtual &amp; Real Viewers

The Viewer

Building Music is a public large scale interactive installation that explores the musicality of different architectural features. By moving the light of a torch (flashlight) along the facade of the building the viewers create musical compositions while lighting the windows. Every window hides a sound and a color and the spectators can play with them from a distance. 

Building Music has been exhibited at the Urban Art Festival (White Night, Bucharest, 2008) and The Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts (Minneapolis, 2009).

Building Music at Urban Art Festival, White Night of Bucharest 9/08

Building Music

Unwearable functional garments II: for three princesses is a single channel 3D animation based on portraying the redesigned and reconstructed garments for three iconic princesses: The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and Cinderella. They are the fairy tale characters who have their own dilemmas. The motion of fabric and design of garments reflect their predicaments and longings. The garments are synthetic and unwearable, but simultaneously they are delivering their fervent perplexity through artificial organic forms and gestures. Each garment is expanding and contracting. They are inhaling and exhaling, and floating and emitting. I specifically conceptualize the sentimental aspects of the stories. The sound track starts with a voice of little child from the classic opening words, &ldquo;once upon a time&hellip;,&rdquo; and gradually reveals the part of the stories we have hardly paid attention to. I chose excerpts from the sentences and words that manifest the crucial contents of the each fairy tale. In this piece, I re meditated the sorrow and serenity of the stories by manipulating imagination.

Still Frame from Unwearable functional garments II

Unwearable functional garments II: for three princesses

vision is an open source C++ programming library for the development of audiovisual interactive applications. It is designed to provide a high level of programming / scripting simplicity, so that users can focus upon the artistic process and the development of application content rather than the intricacies of the technology and programming required to create and to manipulate graphics is real-time. vision is targeted primarily for use by artists, technologists, video game creators and hobbyist, who are competent interactive designers, yet may not have a high level of programming proficiency. vision also provides access to wrapped libraries for advanced users with increased capabilities. 

vision&rsquo;s objective is to combine the simplicity of tools designed to be used by artists with the robust performance of video game development libraries. The current vision implementation includes: 
<ul>
<li>Application framework</li>
<li>Image loading, saving and processing</li>
<li>2D / 3D graphics support - graphics primitives; 3D object loading; Ogre material system; basic lighting; 3D camera control</li>
<li>Rigid body physics</li>
<li>Sound loading, playback and analysis</li>
<li>Video playback</li>
<li>GUI (graphical user interface) with debugging output</li>
<li>Input via mouse, keyboard, microphone or video camera computer vision - background subtraction, frame differencing, blob detection</li>
<li>Doxygen documentation with some basic examples (demos) to expose common library features</li>
</ul>

vision logo

vision

Replication of System, 2008 is an interactive, kinetic, sculptural installation, that explores communication through computer-human interaction and visual feedback. The human brain is the inspiration for the sculpture&rsquo;s communication system; a central control unit receives a sigal (sound input from cardioid microphones) which then transmits electrical impulses throughout the interactive spatial circuit. At the core of the system is an Arduino board - a physical computing platform based on a simple I/O board and a development environment that uses the Processing / Wiring language. The core represents the systems &ldquo;nucleus&rdquo; from which the flow of information or data radiates. Contact sensors are connected to vine-like appendages that extend from the sculpture and are attached to various surfaces within the space it occupies. These &ldquo;tentacles&rdquo; act like sound sensitive ears, collecting input from participants through surface vibration. User input triggers a series of LEDs to illuminate and sound to be output via Piezo speakers and tranducers. The sculpture&rsquo;s mood or reaction is directly correlated to the nature of the user interaction; if the user pounds a surface rapidly, the system will respond vibrantly to reflect an aggressive reaction. 

Replication of System creates a feeling of ever expansive growth and informational movement. The project consists of a chaotic wire-filled nucleus that is attached to two sets of consecutive rings. Stretching out from the center of the project are vine-like arms that contain the small, yet powerful sound sensors. The appendages are attached to walls and flat surfaces in the space it occupies. A diffused spotlight illuminates the sculpture to create a sparkling coagulation of copper wire. As one moves around the piece, the illusion of growing wires emerges adding movement / life to the sculpture. 

Replication of System is an exploration into how technology is an extension of the human mind. Using our brains as inspiration, we are expanding technological systems to create what was once perceived as impossible.

Replication of System, 2008

snstncntnrs is an open video project in the form of files that include a set of cuts described in a EDL and Final Cut Pro XML file. These cuts can be applied to any video using video editing applications. Translation: Paige Treebridge has created a Final Cut timeline - complete with a variety of cuts and effects - but without the video content. 

Participants / Users can import snstncntnrs - as an XML or EDL file - into any compatible program and add video to the empty, stylized timeline. The experimental and &ldquo;open&rdquo; nature of the project lies with the user, who creates a unique personalized video based on how they work within the constraints of the snstncntnrs timeline.

snstncntnrs EDL

snstncntnrs

Interrogation is a network of projects that includes seizure-edited video and live re-enactment of that video. The work is shown as video, live theater reproducing that video and video of live theater reproducing the initial video. Interrogation is currently being folded into Dog Days, a larger-scale theatrical production.

Still from Interrogation Video

Interrogation

BendyBots are a series of twenty animatronic creatures. The project is an imaginative daydream about what future mergers of technology and nature could produce. The robots were inspired by oceanic plant life. 

Each robot was on a Flexinol mechanism. I chose to echo the feel of an ocean by incorporating glowing blue electroluminescent wires into the center of the robots&rsquo; worm-like bodies. 

The robots sit on a white rectangular shelf, constantly swaying from right to left, as though an unseen current was moving them. I designed small mechanics for each BendyBot. 

The mechanisms are constructed to have one static resistance arm and two active arms that could pull independently of each other, while still being on one removable unit. 

The project is designed to be easily accessible to have the mechanisms replaced, while still being light enough to affordably ship across the country. 

The entire project was created from easily accessible materials. The housing was carefully constructed from white foamcore. Each BendyBot is comprised of two halves, the publicly visible &ldquo;bots&rdquo; and the internal mechanisms driving the &ldquo;bots&rdquo;. 

The publicly visible part was created from strips of clear plastic and then folded, accordion style, for the body with three pieces of fishing line run up along the edges. A single piece of electroluminescent wire runs up the center of the body. 

The internal mechanisms were created out of a small piece of Plexiglas and foamcore for the arms with metal screws and Flexinol wire. Instead of using noisy micro servos motors, I found a silent heat-activated wire to be a better choice. Muscle wire (aka - Nitinol / Flexinol wire) is a metal material which uses the heat of an electrical impulse to contract the metal. Nitinol belongs to a class of materials called Shaped Memory Alloys (SMA). SMA&rsquo;s have interesting mechanical properties (Nitinol, 2007). 

SMA metals have been a popular material in bio-mechanical design and engineering. Nitinol&rsquo;s physical function resembles biological muscle; when activated it contracts. To activate Nitinol it is heated above its transition temperature (typically 70C). An electric current may be passed through the wire to heat it electrically. As the material cools it can be stretched back it its original length (Nitinol, 2007). 

The most problematic part of making these mechanisms was trying to get the flexinol wire to stay connected between the fishing line and the electrically charged screws. 

Since the flexinol wire is thin and cannot be soldered to metal connectors because of low heat tolerance, it was very difficult finding a solution. That solution was using hot glue to attach the muscle wire to small solid core wire pieces and finally soldering current carrying wire to those small connector wires. In my application of the muscle wire, the wire takes on a spring like behavior. 

A Wiring micro-controller board sends out electrical impulses. These impulses are sent in one second intervals. The electrical impulse sent out is limited to 2 volts; however, my flexinol wires needed 4.5 volts to contract. I created a supplementary electronic component board. 

This extra board had 40 reed relays on it and each reed relay acted as a switch. The wiring board&rsquo;s 2 volts would trigger the reed relays to open and allow 4.5 volts to activate the muscle wires which started the mechanisms. 

Since only one arm would be active, the other arm would be resting and the static resistance arm would become counter-springs. When the flexinol wire started to cool the other straight arms would slowly pull the active arm upright or back to an at rest position. Simple programming code controlled all of the robots&rsquo; movements. 

Programming code was created in collaboration with, EVL Phd candidate, Ratko Jagodic.

Close-Up of BendyBot Segment

BendyBots

Passing &ldquo;Place for Games&rdquo; visualizes the world famous Kizhi site as high-resolution 3D environment. The goal of this project is to create a virtual prototype of the current state of Kizhi wooden architecture. Kizhi museum preserves a concentration of masterpieces of the Russian heritage and protected by World Heritage List of UNESCO. The visualization reconstructs the original architecture of Kizhi island based on the detailed photographs, architectural and geometric measurements, textural data and video surveys taken during the visit of Kizhi as well as geometric analysis of the surviving structure. The project is being developed using the latest concepts in real-time graphics, including complex illumination with dynamic-irradiance environment mapping, shadow mapping, and complex materials with normal and gloss mapping. 

Word &ldquo;kizhi&rdquo; is translated from Karelian as &ldquo;a place for games.&rdquo; In ancient times people gathered here and performed their religious rituals. Kizhi is located on an island in Lake Onega in northern Karelia in Russia. The Kizhi ensemble consists of the 1714 Church of the Transfiguration, the 1764 Church of the Intercession and the Belfry, an octagonal bell tower that was restored in 1874. A remote location, travel distance, limited building access due to restoration efforts make the Kizhi site difficult to visit. The visualization recreates virtual environment of the ensemble and the island landscape, animated historical evolution in the interactive high-resolution application controlled by the user. 

The 3D architectural models restore the original state of the churches with geometrical precision and symmetrical balance. They are based on the architectural plans and high resolution and photographic and video data. The original symmetry of the churches was lost due to numerous restorations and environmental conditions. 

The development approach is based on the latest techniques in real-time computer graphics techniques, including per-pixel illumination and shadow generation. Normal and gloss mapping are used for a richer, more detailed surface representation to visualize the details of the deteriorating wood with possible historic accuracy and photorealistic rendering. These techniques allow realistic re-creation of the material properties of the structures under different lightening effects with higher resolution and accuracy.

Passing Place for Games

Passing Place for Games

Chiasmus is EVLer Stephen Cady&rsquo;s MFA thesis research project; it is a responsive and dynamically reflective, two-sided volumetric projection surface that embodies phenomenological issues such as the formation and reception of images, observer and machine perception and the dynamics of the screen as a space of image reception. It consists of a square grid of 64 individually motorized cube elements engineered to move linearly. Each cube is controlled by custom software that analyzes video imagery for luminance values and sends these values to the motor control mechanisms to coordinate the individual movements. The resolution of the sculptural screen from the individual movements allows its volume to dynamically alter, providing novel and unique perspectives of its mobile form to an observer. 

Chiasmus stems from the artist&rsquo;s interest in programming and building physical computing applications, and the idea of the translatable nature of digital data that would allow for the generation of physical movement. Working primarily with visual media, Chiasmus investigates the formation of imagery and its aesthetic reception and perception. A main inspiration for this work are the stage designs and World Expo installations of Josef Svoboda and the expanded cinema environments of Peter Weibel, Jeffrey Shaw, and Stan VanDerBeek. Of primary interest is the dynamics of light interacting with the different depths and surface materials, and the transformation of the projected image. 

Chiasmus incorporates the projection of video imagery onto a three-dimensional surface that is also dynamically mobile and kinetically responsive to the projected light source. The result is a dialogic exchange between the moving surface and the projected imagery, that forms a generative process and produces an evolving and ultimately unpredictable outcome.

Chiasmus Exhibition 2008

Chiasmus

&ldquo;Passing Excellence&rdquo; is an artistic visualization research project centered on the world famous architectural ensemble <a href='http://kizhi.karelia.ru/'>Kizhi</a>. 

The Kizhi Pogost, located on an island in Lake Onega (Karelia, Russia) is a historically significant architectural complex with a valuable collection of artifacts and icons, built in harmony with the surrounding landscape as an authentic museum of ancient wood building tradition. 

The Kizhi Pogost is an outstanding example of medieval and post-medieval orthodox settlements, preserving a concentration of masterpieces of Russian heritage. The site is currently included in the List of Most Endangered Sites of the World Monuments Watch protected by World Heritage List of UNESCO. 

The &ldquo;Passing Excellence&rdquo; research project focuses upon developing interactive visualizations of the deteriorating site - both capturing the current state of the ensemble, as well as attempting to reconstruct historical architectural stages of building exteriors and interior elements / artifacts beginning from the 15th Century up to the 21st Century. 

The &ldquo;Passing Excellence&rdquo; visualization is based on detailed photographs, architectural and geometric measurements, textural data, video surveys and resources from the Kizhi State Open-Air Museum archives; 3-dimensional models are being constructed using Autodesk Maya. The application development uses Electro, an easy-to-use scripting system for the development of interactive 3-D applications spanning multiple processors and displays such as tiled display devices or desktop systems. 

This project hopes to preserve the Kizhi ensemble&rsquo;s cultural heritage and historical significance by creating a virtual reconstruction of the site and sharing the application with cultural institutions, museums, researchers and educators worldwide. 

The project is being developed in collaboration with a computer science researcher Robert Kooima, a specialist in the field of data visualization and real-time 3D graphics in Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL).

The Church of Transfiguration in 2006

Passing Excellence

CytoViz is an artistic, real-time information visualization driven by statistical information gathered during gigabit network transfers to the Scalable Adaptive Graphical Environment (SAGE). Data streams are mapped to cellular organisms defining their structure and behavior as autonomous agents. Network bandwidth drives the growth of each entity and the latency defines its physics-based independent movements. The collection of entities is bound within the 3D representation of the local venue. This visual and animated metaphor allows the public to experience the complexity of high-speed network streams that are used in the scientific community. 

CytoViz displays the presence of discoverable Bluetooth devices carried by nearby persons. The concept is to generate an event-specific, real-time visualization that creates informational 3D patterns based on actual local presence. The observed Bluetooth traffic is put in opposition of the wide-area networking traffic by overlaying 2D animations on top of the 3D world. Each device is mapped to an animation fading over time while displaying the name of the detected device and its unique physical address.

Screenshot from CytoViz

CytoViz

From the telegraph to modern live satellite feeds, a flattening of time and space has occurred via technologies concerned with communication and media. This occurrence prompted Paul Virilio to speculate upon the concept of chronoscopic time, a viewpoint based upon the speed of light as a replacement for prior conceptions of the passage of time chronologically. In his formulation, a new realization utilizing the photographic metaphor of underexposed - exposed - overexposed is substituted for the recognizable past - present - future structure. 

These pieces attempt to visually explore this possibility. 

Photographed with a single camera, the object was placed upon a turntable and photographed from different angles to produce the 180&deg; view. The prosthetic and &ldquo;virtual&rdquo; head deliberately looks back into the past, forward into the future and direct gaze upon the viewer in the present. 

Multiple video cameras placed at different angles and heights surround the subject and capture simultaneously. The resulting frames are superimposed upon each other and re-constructed through post-production techniques. The attempt further illustrates the flattening of time and space and the perceptible conjoining of these states by allowing the viewer to see from multiple vantages simultaneously.

Simultaneous, QTVR Object Movie, Infinite Loop

Chronoscopic

Pan is an interactive visual installation that facilitates a collaborative performance among users. 

The title of the work is a Korean word that invokes several different meanings: plate, disk, place, stage. The reference to a plate corresponds to the interface used in the work, while simultaneously referencing a Korean tradition - the designation of a public performance space within the community that is for eyeryone&rsquo;s use, and a gathering place for performance. 

The installation invites the audience to participate in its synthetic movement and provides a space for community interaction. By interacting with a tangible interface, the installation renders tabletops with a new aesthetic that is generative and organic. Interactive activities are interpreted as softened dynamics visually by a generic particle system algorithm. The three interfaces are capable of network communication to form an interconnection among participants.

The Pan installation

In all of us we have stored away memories and experiences that can be conjured up with the slightest trigger. A personal encounter of mine consists of frequent flashbacks to my native country, India. There are numerous occasions when I&rsquo;ll hear a car with a bad engine drive by and immediately recall my days in Gujarat riding in a rikshaw, or more specifically, when I see a certain shade of red on a woman&rsquo;s lips, I&rsquo;m brought back to my cousin&rsquo;s wedding day and the lipstick she wore that matched so perfectly with her sari. In cognitive psychology terms, this type of auditory and visual processing contributes to a type of memory called Episodic, the recollection of events that include time, place, and associated emotions. 

Cue is a systems-based artwork representing the visual processing experienced during moments of recollection. By designing an algorithm to track color relationships between my database of video diaries from India and images captured real time in the exhibition space, a unique perspective is created on visual stimuli that cue our past.

skin is a real-time interactive installation that visualizes a dialogue between physical and digital senses of &ldquo;touch&rdquo;. The installation consists of a screen that works as artificial skin, onto which hyperstereo skin-related video imagery is projected. The imagery is accompanied by a generative composition of digitally manipulated and synthesized skin sounds: porous breathing, the friction of skin on various surfaces, and synthesized representations of the electrical impulses inherent in skin at the molecular level. These skin-derived media serve as an exploration of a new territory: the intersection of the human body as landscape / mindscape and the body&rsquo;s own traces of touch. 

By reacting to physical interaction with the screen, the skin-derived media are virtually deformed by the participating audience. Physical gestures are translated into accentuated and non-literal digital deformations of the projected imagery while new sounds, both organic and synthetic, are added to the mix to accompany these deformations. 

skin is a VR installation displayed on a C-Wall system and it is developed on Electro. Electro is an open-source application development environment designed for use on both cluster-driven tiled displays and desktop systems. Electro is based on the MPI process model and is bound to the Lua programming language. With support for 3D graphics, 2D graphics, audio, and input handling, Electro provides an easy-to-use scripting system for interactive applications spanning multiple processors and displays. Electro supports Linux, Windows 2K / XP, and Mac OS X. 

Hyperstereo imagery is shot using High Definition video cameras. 

Sound design and editing is completed in Mac OS X using Bias&rsquo; Peak and Apple&rsquo;s Soundtrack for editing, and Propellerhead&rsquo;s Reason for synthesis.

Still from skin, 2006

skin

&ldquo;Rutopia 2&rdquo; is a collaborative virtual reality art project designed for interaction and display on the CAVE or CWall (configurable wall) advanced visualization environments. 

It describes a magic garden with interactive sculptural trees that branch to distant worlds; participants traverse the branches into a shared networked community. The design of &ldquo;Rutopia 2&rdquo; was also motivated by EVL&rsquo;s current research focus in high-resolution tiled display devices / systems. The potential of high-resolution, cluster computing, image segmentation and modularity contributed in this projects conceptualization. 

In &ldquo;Rutopia 2&rdquo; users look through the screens to see distant environments as if gazing through a window to see the outside world. Virtual 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 public sculptures propagating shared telecommunication and collaboration. 

&ldquo;Rutopia 2&rdquo; explores the aesthetics of virtual art in its relationship with Russian painting (e.g. Palekh, Khokhloma, Dymkovo toys, Fedoskino and Lubok) and folk art. The design is based upon traditional Russian principles of composition, bright colors, simplified shapes, and material culture; Rutopian aesthetics help to provide the mental and spiritual escape from everyday reality into a magic niche. It serves as a framing device to unite the concepts of the &ldquo;network&rdquo; tree, public sculpture, and futuristic design while maintaining aesthetic principles of the previous centuries.

Rutopia 2

Compose, sculpt, and improvise with other musicians and artists in an ephemeral garden of sonic lifeforms. Synthecology invites visitors in this digitally fertile space to create a musical sculpture of sythesized tones and sound samples provided by web inhabitants. Upon entering the garden, each participant can pluck contributed sounds from the air and plant them, wander the garden playing their own improvisation or collaborate with other participants to create / author a new composition. 

As each new &ldquo;seed&rdquo; is planted and grown, sculpted and played, this garden becomes both a musical instrument and a composition to be shared with the rest of the network. Every inhabitant creates, not just as an individual composer shaping their own themes, but as a collaborator in real time who is able to improvise new soundscapes in the garden by cooperating with other avatars from diverse geographical locations. 

Virtual participants are fully immersed in the garden landscape through the use of passive stereoscopic technology and spatialized audio to create a networked tele-immersive environment where all inhabitants can collaborate, socialize and play. Guests from across the globe are similarly embodied as avatars through out this environment, each experiencing the audio and visual presence of the others. 

Participants from the WWW use a browser interface to contribute sound elements to the garden environment for use as compositional items. All the while, this real-time composition is streamed through web broadcast of the virtual environment to illustrate the audio-visual transformation of the garden. Broadcast throughout the entirety of the festival, Synthecology will celebrate the possibilities of collaboration, improvisation, and distributed authorship that exist on the horizon of an increasingly interconnected world. 

As current advances in networking become commonplace, the creation of collaborative environments connecting remote individuals will become less involved. By augmenting the possibilities for users to share sensory presence through tele-immersive interfaces, <a href='http://www.appliedinteractives.com/'>Applied Interactives</a> intends to combine the possibilities of real-time collaboration and socialization with the dynamics of digital creation and manipulation. Synthecology is a speculative glance at how the technology of today may be utilized to create new autonomous zones for sampling &amp; re-mixing culture.

synthecology shore view

synthecology

InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box was a collaborative work that explored the basic characteristics of the &ldquo;box&rdquo;. The box served as a metaphor for the physical, social, political or psychological constraints that we and/or others project upon us. The box also represented a sense of place in the realm of the virtual as well as in our sub-conscience. With the aid of over twenty-six performance artists, electro-acoustic musicians / composers, virtual reality and motion capture artists / technologists and others, we examined the numerous representations the &ldquo;box&rdquo; encompasses. 

Artists in Salt Lake City UT, Fairbanks AK, Missoula MT, Chicago IL, West Lafayette IN and College Park MD simultaneously performed and transmitted their interpretations to the other sites and the Access Grid venue. In that venue, people from around the world could view the performances. At the host site in Salt Lake City, the director, coalesced more than twenty video streams from all six sites, mixed and processed them for the local audience and then streamed the processed videos back onto the internet for the audiences at other sites. 

InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box premiered on April 15 - 17, 2005. In addition, it was performed at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California on August 3 - 4, 2005 and at the Supercomputing Global 2005 Conference at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington on November 17, 2005. Presentations of the project were given at the International Federation of Theatre Research Conference at University of Maryland on June 26 - July 2, 2005 and the Humanities and Technology Conference at Snowbird, Utah on October 6 - 8, 2005. For more information and video of some of the performances, please visit <a href='http://www.anotherlanguage.org/interplay'>www.anotherlanguage.org/interplay</a>.

LMIB Video Still

Loose Minds in a Box

Not long ago, in a galaxy not far away&hellip; 

The Centauri of the Lightwalker&rsquo;s Guild, the traditional explorers of the Nebulous Empire, have long had a challenging rite of passage for prospective members. The candidate is abandoned in a previously unexplored planetary system. The candidate is equipped with a beacon but no power source. To activate the beacon and thereby complete the challenge, the candidate must construct an energy circuit between at least three planets and at least one moon. The candidate is forbidden from including stars or inhabited planets in the circuit. 

The game&rsquo;s purpose is to give the experience of seamless travel throughout the solar system, incorporating elements of scale, speed, pressure, sound, and gravity. The goal is to create a specified number of links between planets and moons. Each planet has a finite amount of energy that is depleted by each missed attempt; if the energy is used up, the planet explodes and the game ends as a severe failure. There is a time limit of two minutes per planet, after which the beacon is automatically activated and the game ends as a minor failure. The user&rsquo;s reward for each successful link is the opportunity to explore a new planet and continue playing a bit longer. The game inevitably ends when the user either runs out of time or completes the required number of links, with an ending sequence of withdrawing from the solar system and viewing the links that were made. 

Arcanius is a one-player game.

Still from Arcanius

Arcanius

The form of space is used to evoke a sublime environment that dramatically transforms by expanding and contracting, according to the position of the viewer. UNFOLDING SPACE visualizes space as a tessellation of higher dimensional objects - polytopes - into a grid, that is navigated in rotating, slow paced four dimensions, by moving from one polytope to the next, trailing over a higher dimensional path. 

In order to make the structure and distinctive points of view of the grid visible, a mesh or set of objects are placed and anchored to the four dimensional vertices of the grid. An abstract enveloping landscape is constructed. that in turn, is a playground for becoming familiar with the distortion of four dimensional space, in a manner similar to how we get to understand orthogonal or perspective projections. 

The passage through the projections of a higher dimensional environment is likened to a walk through the forest, at the precise moment when the light causes the foliage and the shadows of the trees to merge into a unified pattern. 

UNFOLDING SPACE is developed as a CWALL (configurable wall) and CAVE virtual reality experience.

UNFOLDING SPACE

Dinner at the Fairy Castle is an experimental project aimed at low cost alternatives to keying in actors in traditional movie sets. Using a virtual set, one can cut costs in regards to renting space, furniture, general labor and much more. With skilled artists, one can achieve the right look of a set - color, lighting, prop placement - with less production time! 

Dinner at the Fairy Castle: A Virtual Set, is an attempt to recreate the dining room of the Fairy Castle exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. Since the actual exhibit is miniature in size, the artists thought it would be fun for audience participants to actually see themselves keyed inside one of the famous elegant rooms of the castle. Through windows of the virtual dining room, the participant can see live video of people peeking into the room! Dinner at the Fairy Castle: A Virtual Set brings the essence of the MSI exhibit into virtual reality.

Dinner at the Fairy Castle: A Virtual Set

P.O - 2.4 is a 3D animation based on a traditional painting that was exhibited as part of my BFA thesis project in 2000. 

&ldquo;I am part of something whose entirety is part of me&rdquo; 

The Butterfly is used as a metaphor for myself in the P.O - 2.4 animation.

P.o - 2.4 Animation

P.O-2.4 [memory]

eternal joy: no words 
video - 00.30 seconds 

eternal joy: no words is an experimental work which confronts Josephine&rsquo;s choice to travel inside and stay in a world between childhood and midlife. She desires this because it saves her spiritual and creative worlds. She is the eyes of a child; it is her choice, eternal joy, no words. Divine silence. 

Feature Players: Josephine Lipuma: Women, l.s as Little Tex-Rex circle Dancer, b.k as Blurry Little Princess

A still image from eternal joy: no words.

eternal joy: no words

P.O - 2.4 is a OpenGL / Inventor project based on a traditional painting that was exhibited as part of my BFA thesis project in 2000. 

P.O 2.4 is about real-time based movement of moving images. It explores the area of the vitality of space and movement generation spaces. I want to think about space as an action-oriented or a dynamic process. It was more intriguing to focus on the empty space, which each page generates as time passes, rather than the pages themselves. 

All cubes randomly move in real time and never are self-repetitive. They are based on a set of simple rules that create complex orders.

P.o 2.4

P.O 2.4

The objective of this project is to create intriguing artistic images using the latest advancements is visual effects technology. This includes procedural weathering, subsurface rendering, projection based rendering, and shader algorithms. 

Studies in New Zealand culture and arts will also be influential in the artistic content of the project. 

The project is being done in collaboration with Weta Digital, New Zealand. Weta Digital is a leading visual effects company, having recently created visual effects for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Aotearoa Project

In this advanced technological age, digitally-driven collaborative activities suffer from inadequate multi-user platforms. Few existing computer technologies promote face-to-face interactions and provide simultaneous multiple inputs. Tangible tabletop systems can simulate the richness that traditional collaboration affords, while supporting the technological needs of digital collaboration. 

This thesis describes the architecture and implementation of StorySpace, a new groupware application that supports parallel user input through a tangible user interface. Using radio frequency identification technology to automatically track tokens, or physical embodiments of virtual operations, StorySpace synchronizes activity in the real world with what users see in the digital world. 

Usability studies were conducted in the context of digital media poster design exercises for an 11th grade English class. Preliminary results are promising, in that they reveal that StorySpace promoted interaction and discussion within a small group of students.

StorySpace

STORYSPACE:  A Collaborative Tangible Design and Presentation System

Olympics is an OpenGl animation that explores the journey to the Olympic Games in a symbolic approach, playing with the five Olympic rings, the Torch and abstract golden environments. 

The golden material for the environments consists of an allusion to the dream of every athlete - the Olympic gold medal. 

The rings - symbolizing the athletes from the five continents, move around the different environments, which represent the different phases the athletes faces during the journey, arising, falling, struggling and interacting with each other, in an interpretation of the relationships between the competitors. 

The most beautiful moment happens when the rings, together, form the Mandala - the &ldquo;magic circle&rdquo;, a metaphor for the spirit of total communion between all the athletes and their nations. 

The sound track by John Williams is harmoniously integrated with the various scenes transactions along the animation, translating the feelings of determination and passion pertinent to the Olympic spirit. 

Olympics placed first among the class projects in AD 408 - Computer Art Design Open GL, Fall 2003.

OLYMPICS

smalltalk is a rendered instance of a virtual 3D environment developed in Maya. The virtual environment functions as a response in a discourse with a physical sculpture named Acrobat, and a gigantic artificial skin surface. I built Acrobat out of wood and mosaic during the summer of 2003. The artificial skin I created in the fall of 2003 measures 200 sq.ft. and is made out of latex. I am captivated by the process of creating various forms and tones of dialogue between digital/virtual and physical sculptures, and I want to explore the discourse-space that is generated by their coexistence. 

smalltalk is an instance of confusion, representing the identity struggle of its creator, in a moment of peace and balance after a long day&rsquo;s battle with the past, present and future. 

Special thanks to: Anastasios Golnas, Inigo Maglano-Ovalle and <a href='http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=5&amp;indi=222'>Daria Tsoupikova</a>.

smalltalk

Setting of Instant Glory 2309 is in the future of Earth, in the year 2309, where racecar driving had turned in Wind Sail Racing (cars have now turned into aerodynamic ships that can fly). The nature of the game play is to react to the complex race course with filled with sharp turns and speed boosters laid out in front of the player and to ultimately beat the AI controlled competitor. 

The Victory Condition for the game will be the completion of each completed track within a certain amount of time as the AI or by attaining first place. 

This game is mainly targeted for people who like fast reaction time dependant games. It has the potential to keep the interest player who can play for hours on end but is mainly targeted for people who need to play in sessions. Saving should be done automatically to prevent users from cheating on the statistics of the game. 

Please Click on the link below to download a Demo Version of Instant Glory 2309 

<a href='http://www.evl.uic.edu/spiff/class/cs426/projects/fall2003/InfinityGraphics/index.htm'>www.evl.uic.edu/spiff/class/cs426/projects/fall2003/InfinityGraphics/index.htm</a>

A still frame from Instant Glory 2309

Instant Glory 2309

m.b is an interactive VR project in the CAVE. 

Sound plays an increasingly varied and ubiquitous role in CAVE user interaction. In this VR project sound is used as a different interactive medium. The user will first experience a virtual gallery full of playful mobiles that are hanging from the ceiling. The user can experience the movement of each mobile in the virtual gallery by generating a sound. 

Special thanks to: Drew Browning, Daria Tsoupikova and Alex Hill

m.b in the CAVE

m.b : lively, unconventional and totally interactive

The focus of the Burrow Chase game is for a big creature to catch a small creature running through tunnels that are being dynamically created as they move. The small creature has to collect five pieces of food. If the small creature finds all the pieces, an exit portal appears and the small creature escapes. The creatures may also encounter explosives, which they may choose to avoid or pick up, but which will explode if run over. 

At the beginning of the game, the big creature, the small creature, the food and explosives, are randomly positioned. The creatures don&rsquo;t know the location of each other, so, the big creature has to dig tunnels to find the small creature, and the small creature has to dig tunnels to find the pieces of food, while avoiding being caught by the big creature. 

While chasing, the creatures may choose either to continue to dig tunnels or to travel through tunnels already created. Each creature can see its own location and the tunnels they have dug on a sonar map. 

This is a two player game designed for use between two networked computers.

Still Frame from Burrow Chase Game

Burrow Chase

The Creation is a virtual reality art piece that simulates the very first stage of the Creation of the world. 

The user can interact with each of the eight signs of divination on the plate, which symbolizes the universe. Each sign turns into one of the four faces of the world and a corresponding holy guardian animal such as a Tiger, Dragon, Phoenix, and Turtle. Once the world is created, one can interact with these holy animals by throwing stones into one of the four faces of the world.

The Creation

The Creation - From Eight Signs of Divination to the World

Marientina Gotsis&rsquo;s MFA thesis project Inside_Out is a networked dance application combining the physical space with the virtual space with a live broadcast of the performances over a high speed network. The performance portion of the thesis show will feature Robynne Gravenhorst of the <a href='http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Stage/1321/newanahomepg.html'>Anatomical Theatre</a>. The visitor is invited to view the performances and become a performer if they choose to do so. 

Inside_Out is designed as both a physical set and a virtual set, utilizing an experimental optical tracking system and a passive stereo projection screen with custom libraries, written at (EVL) at UIC. Additionally, the conventional means of VR navigation such as a wand or spaceball are disabled, requiring the participant to move in the physical space. Thus, navigation is triggered through movement and energy in the space, affecting the aural environment and occuring in a random fashion. 

The space explorer will find themselves in a seductive but uncomfortable space in which they have to physically navigate in. Their movement affect the ambient audio which mixes with the phonetic sound of letters that pop like bubbles when touched. By chance you may spell out a word but you will battle the space delicately, tempted by colorful and playful letterforms that carry with them a hint of another place. If you touch one of the color letterforms, you will find yourself briefly in a different world full of color and melodies, familiar instruments and spiraling type. You may find yourself in and out of both spaces many times, by chance or by intention you will seek your comfort zone and you will find it in a different place everytime. 

This theme is pulled from a classic choreographic improvisation &ldquo;Comfort Zone&rdquo; where the dancer is invited to imagine themselves in &ldquo;a safety zone, a circle of about two feet in diameter. It might be a place of fun, whereas the outside area is one of drudgery, or the place is a relaxation area whereas outside there is tension. But you are allowed to stay there only five to ten seconds and then you must leave. It is a place to recharge&hellip;&rdquo; (Chaplin / Blom, The Intimate Act of Choreography) This piece &ldquo;flips the table&rdquo; on traditional VR created in the past ten years. 

Inside_Out is rooted in undergraduate experiments within AD409 Electronic Media Events which resulted in a group project / show where the group created a physical motion platform that was real-time controlled by keyboard and complimented a simple animation projected onto a video monitor. 

The influences for Inside_Out begin with Merce Cunningham and &ldquo;Points in Space&rdquo; and the collaboration he accomplished with John Cage on the audio. However, the aim of Inside_Out is not to explicitly choreograph the audio to the visuals. There is no center, front or back to the set and there are no specific instructions for the dancers. The dancers as well as the audience have to discover the flow of the piece. The chaos is carefully orchestrated, ruled by random numbers and patterns - with the playfulness of an Oskar Fischinger animation. The staging and lighting embraces alternative methods popularized by Laterna Magika of Prague. The brightness and translucency that can be achieved with graphics projections in VR seems to be the perfect medium to experiment with for staging purposes.

foam tiles under UV light

INSIDE_OUT Dance, Virtual Reality and Alternative Broadcast Explorations

Waiting In Line is an interactive computer installation of visually rich, graphical representations of waveforms. 

Participants interactively create a series of Lissajous figures, a pattern of lines reminiscent of special effect imagery used in science fiction movies of the 1950&rsquo;s. The resulting images are displayed on a large scale projection screen. 

The horizontal and vertical frequencies of complex, ever-changing waveforms are controlled by participants brandishing two contrasting colored placards, which in varying amounts, yield the resulting forms. 

Designed for a museum setting, Waiting In Line aims to engage museum goers in the installation while &ldquo;waiting&rdquo; to enter a main exhibition space.

Waiting In Line

The student-based experimental media arts group-Nomads &amp; Homesteaders explore bio-technology, emergent behavior, artificial life systems and simulation through, the Open Source Life project. EVLer Beth Cerny joins the School of the Art Institute of Chicago&rsquo;s Film Video New Media and Art &amp; Technology students in the design and development of this on-line installation. 

Conceived and designed in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art&rsquo;s Version&gt;03 event, Open Source Life &ldquo;grows&rdquo; inside a sculptural kiosk. The kiosk is a physical manifestation of the project; like a giant animated pod creature of science fiction, the inflatable kiosk reflects Nomads&rsquo; &amp; Homesteaders&amp; interests and concerns with biotechnology, genetically modified organisms and artificial intelligence. Three conjoined pods stand eight feet in height and diameter. Wild tentacles grow out of the pods, sprawled along the gallery floor and walls. A webcam set inside the kiosk projects through the structure of lime green fabric, creating a fascinating glow within a dark gallery space. 

Open Source Life participants create virtual artificially intelligent plants, designed to adapt to life in a range of virtually created environments. Once created, the virtual plant&rsquo;s survival is the responsibility of its &ldquo;guardian&rdquo; (or the creator). Plant-like avatars represent participants, who are also provided interactive controls to promote a sense of community, resource sharing and collaboration. Outside the context of the physical installation, plants and the environment are tended to by virtual visits via the World Wide Web.

Open Source Life

A year-long collaboration between artists from the US and Vietnam culminates in &ldquo;River of Many Sides&rdquo;. This interactive media performance consists of a virtual environment, which brings people together in networked contexts and which provides a context for performance as well as the occasion for individual exploration. &ldquo;River of Many Sides&rdquo; addresses ideas of conflict and cooperation, powerful complementary forces in our culture at large and in the life of the individual. 

The metaphor of the river journey reflects our countries&rsquo; common history and how that history has shaped the identities of both. This compelling experience addresses concepts of cultural understanding using interactive computer systems and features live performers interacting with audio and visual environments, with audience participation at key points of the experience. Presented at the University of Illinois at Chicago, UIC Theater, June 2004 by ArtSynergy. 

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and by additional funding and support from: Northwestern University: Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, University Research Grants Committee, and the Center for Global Culture and Communication; Columbia College Chicago; University of Illinois at Chicago: College of Architecture and the Arts, School of Art and Design, and Department of Performing Arts; and The National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum Projection equipment courtesy of: ROSCOR Corp., President Paul Roston.

River of Many Sides

River of Many Sides: A Media Performance

Community is about people interacting with each other in a multi-user, networked environment and creating collaborative artwork that changes over time. The participants draw and place icons in a shared workspace as their actions are broadcasted to the others in real-time. As time moves on, the imagery created by the participants slowly fades out allowing new marks to resonate. The participants can print their collaborative artwork capturing a moment in time.

community

The objective of this project was to create visual effects for the independent film Wrecker. 

Wrecker, directed by Nadav Kurtz, explores how sound can influence our perception. In this sequence of the film we follow the sound from the source, through the ear, to fine hairs of the cilia. 

Computer generated imagery was developed to create the effect.

Wrecker

Wrecker, Film Visual Effects

A Perfect Parlor explores how technology can augment human communication, interaction and perceptions when incorporated into personal, social and work spaces. It is a networked tele-immersive virtual environment, where people from around the world can come together in a shared space to talk, play and perform. The Victorian parlor, a metaphor of global socialization is the setting for this virtual experience. Although the historic &ldquo;parlor&rdquo; has come and gone from our homes, the role it has served in Victorian culture can be used as a model in our current techno-invested culture. 

This project directly addresses a particular concern in the art world that new media artists are constantly confronting - &ldquo;art&rdquo; is &ldquo;entertainment&rdquo;, and therefore, unsuitable for critical discussions. The Perfect Parlor is neither art nor entertainment, but rather simply an opportunity for experience. It attempts to create a medium - specifically a communications medium, where anyone can have meaningful experiences. It is a place for infinite stories, and each story having multiple endings. It is not a static experience for each person to consistently recycle the same perspective. Instead it is a space for individuals to create meaningful life experiences and perpetuate their own personal opinions. 

Imagine an immersive room surrounded by networked screens and walls with shared images, text, video and audio. The space is generally intended for individuals and small groups to connect to other people in remote locations and to facilitate communicate with each other in virtual spaces. Communities are formed not based on traditional happenstances such as physical proximity, but more out of similar concerns and interests. 

This is the basis on which The Perfect Parlor virtual experience is created.

The Perfect Parlor

Animagina :: (life+imagination) 

An experimental collaborative VR project which plays with techno-topian / technopocalypse symbols in a conceptual environment. A growing vase, tumbling dice of fate, spiritual pyramids, a menacing robot, and an eye, like a surveillance camera, monitoring our movements. The idea of the project is to reveal the cross-cultural meaning of these objects as they coexist in real time and virtual space. Following the &ldquo;exquisite corpse&rdquo; model, a surrealist technique that exploits the mystique of accident, the symbols come together to transport the user into their spatial logic. The symbols in Animagina are also connected to two subenvironments: Rutopia and Polytopia. 

Rutopia 

My dream is that the entire world is turned into a Park as meltence paradise. This Park should be like this so perfectly combined. 
- Interview with Dimitriy Sergeevich Likhachev discussing the parks surrounding Tsarskoye Selo, Russia. 

Rutopia describes an ideal garden, a fairy Park, which shows the unity of man, nature and technology. Its visual style is based on poetics and symbology from Russian fairy tales and Russian folk art. In Rutopia, trees communicate with the visitor of the Park, and their growth depends on his proximity. In this Park, rationalistic technology, mystery of nature and human presence are harmonized in a perfect balance, &ldquo;as meltence paradise.&rdquo; Rutopia shows this interactive VR Park as a sketch of the premature embodiment of this wonderful time and place. 

Polytopia 

Free-hand brushstrokes lead the eye from face to face on a series of polyhedra, nested inside each other. The user can move inside and out, and rotate the polyhedra around itself to produce different caleidoscope-like compositions. This environment is based on graphic design formal use of two dimensional space, applied to three dimensions. 

Animagina premiered at the <a href='http://www.versionfest.org'>Version&gt;03 :: Digital Art Convergence</a> Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Animagina

Daydreamer is a VR hybrid environment consisting of two worlds the Real and the Imaginary. The real world exists in the City of Chicago, and the imaginary resides in the mind of the author. 

&ldquo;We shall increasinlgy live in two worlds, the real and the virtual, and in many realities, both cultural and spiritual&rdquo; (Roy Ascott)

Daydreamer

Daydreamer

Rutopia is a virtual reality art project developed for the CAVE, GeoWall, passive and active stereo projection environments. It describes an ideal garden, a fairy park, which shows a unity of technology, man, and nature. Its visual style is based on poetics and symbology from Russian fairy tales and folk art. In Rutopia, trees communicate with the visitor of the park, and the growth of the trees is dependent upon the user&rsquo;s proximity. The trees are symbols of interaction, intelligent transmitters that form the environment, flip time, transform perspectives, and conduct a &ldquo;tour&rdquo; of the garden. 

Participants can rotate the garden about themselves to watch and hear the trees growing from the different angles and perspectives. The evolution of tree growth is controlled by the participant; one can explore the patterns of growth moving through time - backwards and forwards. 

Rutopia is also a component to Animagina :: (life+imagination) - an experimental collaborative VR project which plays with techno-topian / technopocalypse symbols in a conceptual landscape.

Rutopia

In Hindu-Buddhist concept, Maya stands for the constant movement of the universe, so powerfully masking the essence of all matter that the phenomenal world of reality can only be perceived behind a &ldquo;veil of illusion&rdquo;. 

The virtual environment of Maya solely materializes a communication interface, whereby the space in between scales down to one single layer, an elastic membrane that is spanned between the two remote users. 

Processing and interpreting the data of camera images, it becomes a tactile surface of intermediation that reacts sensitively to every single touch of the user. Each site presents both users interfering from both sides of the veil. Yet the representation of the data underlies the play of the veil&rsquo;s forces, and gets thus continually transformed by system&rsquo;s capability to interpret users&rsquo; interplay and to memorize previous time fragments. 

Investigating the ambiguous relationship between the users and their virtual representation, the only layer, through which the two participants can perceive each other, represents the system&rsquo;s own reflection of their dialogue.

Maya - Veil of Illusion

The goal of this project is to produce cinematic quality effects in a real-time virtual enviroment. This required research and development to two techniques, baked lighting and shaders. 

Baked lighting is the technique of rendering lighting into the texture of a 3d object. This allows us to give natural soft shadows and shading to static objects. This technique can also be used to render the occlusive properties of an object. 

Shaders allows us to have controls of how the object is rendered in real time. We have complete control of the properties of the material, shading, lighting, and distortion. 

The real time shaders were written using NVidia&rsquo;s CG language.

Cinematic Effects for Virtual Enviroments

The objective of the Virtual Bronzeville Project is to create a virtual model of the history of Bronzeville, Chicago. This model will illustrate Bronzeville&rsquo;s complex social, political, economic, and cultural systems. By using virtual environments, animations, interviews, and GIS data, users will be able to explore this historic area.

Virtual Bronzeville

The Shared Spaces project is a collaborative virtual reality experience on a VR Portal installation system. The space is designed to be a community meeting area where participants from varied backgrounds can come together in a tele-immersive environment and cooperate to create a mutually meaningful convergence. 

These participants will be able to join into the virtual world through the VR Portal at the MCA and from other physically remote VR systems. 

Through the passage of time, the space evolves into a collective expression of the participants intentions. The virtual objects and activities in the space begin as pre-determined constructs by the artists and gradually develop based on user-input. 

The virtual environment is sub-divided into three seperate areas accessible from a main entranceway. Participants are first confronted with &ldquo;Confluxus&rdquo;, an architectural portal that reacts to the positions and movements of the users within it by revealing only the parts of the structure that are within users&rsquo; proximity. 

Within this space, the participants can see each others&rsquo; avatars leaving trails from their wake in the 3D architectural grid. 

From here, participants are encouraged to move to one of the three virtual project rooms (Infinite Studio, Super Spectacular and Syn.aesthetic).

Shared Spaces

Kites Flying In and Out of Space is a seminal work, as the first high bandwidth virtual-reality art piece ever created. 

The content is a study and replication of the flying kinetic artwork of Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier. The piece was exhibited at the iGRID2002 Conference September 23-26th 2002, hosted by SARA in Amsterdam, Netherlands. 

The complexity involved with calculating and rendering data is facilitated by distributed computing over high-speed networks. Because the calculations for these kinetic art pieces (kites) are so computationally intensive, a single PC can only support the simulation of one kite. 

To support the many kites flown at iGrid, collaborators with computing resources around the world are performing the physically-based kite simulations at their home institutions and then streaming the results of the calculations, in real time, to Amsterdam. 

In essence, this is grid computing for the arts. 

Kites Flying In and Out of Space utilizes a &ldquo;Grid&rdquo; model for real time steering of calculations on computers distributed over high-speed networks. 

Each of the 12 kites appearing in the piece utilizes up to 15 megabits per second. This art piece uses a total of approximately 180 megabits per second in calculating the forms and theoretically could utilize even more. 

CAVEs around the world could potentially view this application through a connection to the Starlight high-speed networking program. The kite structures are so complex to simulate that a distributed computational model using processors on multiple machines is needed. 

Kites Flying In and Out of Space enlists servers distributed across the globe in Chicago, Canada, Japan, Singapore and Virginia to calculate its forms. Each of these servers &ldquo;stream&rdquo; a single kite to SARA in Amsterdam where they are then displayed in a CAVE. 

A participant in the CAVE presentation can manipulate the kites and control the wind. When a person injects wind into the scene, messages are sent to all the servers. These messages contain information regarding wind direction and strength. The servers then calculate the modifications to their individual kite structures. That information is then streamed back into the CAVE. This process is called real time simulator steering and it is the basis for the steering of high performance calculations on super computers distributed over a high-speed network. 

This &ldquo;grid&rdquo; model has never been used for art prior to Kites Flying In and Out of Space. It is an example of &ldquo;Grid&rdquo; computing, resulting in an original, seminal work of art.

Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier Manipulates the Kites

Kites Flying In and Out of Space

CityCluster: From the Renaissance to the Gigabits Networking Age is a virtual reality and high-speed networking project that juxtaposes the Renaissance and the emerging Gigabits Networking Age, represented metaphorically by Florence and Chicago. 

The project aims to explore the opportunities offered by advanced information technology in order to make this digital tool a more humanistic instrument of communication for the fruition of artistic content and communication. 

This project was initiated by Franz Fishnaller and Prof. Alberto Del Bimbo, Project Coordinator and Deputy Rector for Research and Innovation Transfer at University of Florence (UNIFI) and Member of the Scientific Board of MICC. 

Developed in Florence and Chicago, both sites will host a networked VR interactive visualization system, enabling the local and remote visitor to access and share the virtual reality collaborative environment. Tele-Immersion or collaborative virtual reality shared over networks enables the visitors to interact with each other as well as with three-dimensional models over distance, in real-time. 

High-speed networking technology will be used as a creative tool for communication in all the phases of development: pre-production, production, testing, implementing and exhibition. The net visitor interacts through the avatars in a &ldquo;Virtual Plaza&rdquo;, which integrates the Renaissance and the Gigabits Networking Age. 

The exhibit / event will take place in December 2002 in real-time between Florence and Chicago.

CityCluster

CityCluster: From the Renaissance to the Gigabits Networking Age

With the growing amount of interactive artworks, questions over artistic control and intent have become more important than ever. Please Adjust specifically empowers participants with the ability to create their own visual aesthetic. Four dials on an antique television case allow people to vary the screen image from the extreme minimal to the geometrically complex. However, the final image is not a static &ldquo;perfect&rdquo; model of the image from their heads. 

Tiny amounts of analog and digital noise permeate through the system to create a jittery effect on the screen. This creates the realization that they are not 100% in control of their creation and that they are actually collaborating with an unknown force-in a broad sense, technology. Just like any collaboration, the more time spent engaged with the work, the better a participant understands the computer&rsquo;s behavior model and the stronger the connection becomes.

Please Adjust

Liquidon is an immersive, realtime, audio-visual composition that explores the field of ITC. 

ITC, an acronym for Instrumental Trans-Communication, is a field of research pertaining to the use of technological apparatus to facilitate communication with the dead. 

Liquidon incorporates stereoscopic projection and an interactive, multi-channel soundscape.

liquidon218

Liquidon

Beat Box presents networked CAVE&trade; participants with a playful arena of interactive virtual sound machines. 

Each of three machines has a unique periodic duration and controls, respectively, tones or notes, ambient loops and bass sounds. 

Beat Box is virtual sonic chronometry as the environment is enveloped in keeping time with the sound machines. 

Participants cycle through sound selections and give voice to a sound by introducing it to a thoroughly odd indigenous head. Each head represents a distinct interval in a scale that contributes to the resultant delivery of the collective instruments.

Beat Box

ID:Illusion is an artist&rsquo;s exploration of the subconscious as a metaphorical journey.

ID:Illusion

Man+Machine is one in a series of ImmersaGrams that portray a clinical analysis of the evolution of the human species when aided by machine technology. 

The 3D images have a similar aesthetic to X-Rays, but with an added third dimension. The stark contrast of bone, muscle and tissue against wire, microchips and gears present the viewer with an unnatural juxtaposition. The subtle movement of the gears and muscles adds vitality to an otherwise cold and lifeless image.

man+machine

Excavation is a networked virtual environment that explores the mediated surface of historiography. 

Excavation immerses its visitors in a metaphoric archeology of encounter, wherein their presence engenders temporally unique and continually adaptive sets of relationships between the networked participants, the fluctuating anatomy of the metaphoric landscape, and its multitudinous inhabitants. 

These inhabitants constitute a subjective aggregate of modern history as captured and conditioned by the technological apparatus of post-industrial society. 

Alive on the Grid, visitors are recorded and become virtual inhabitants extending and re-contextualizing the history of &ldquo;Excavation&rdquo;. 

Additional programming support provided by Alex Hill.

Excavation

Home Transfer is an art project that explores the intersection of architecture, the Internet and the public sphere. We investigate the impact of new technologies on home and community. The aim is to build a space for speculation. 

The project comprises: 
<ul>
<li>The offering of a sealed, weevil-infested stack of bread-bowls to chosen architects.</li>
<li>The discussion generated by the object.</li>
<li>The diffusion of these discussions through this Web site.</li>
<li>Public participation in the two guest-books provided.</li>
</ul>

Home Transfer

In this networked virtual environment, the user perspective begins in outer space, surrounded by sun and Earth images based on real-time satellite information, than falls to Earth and lands on a northern Lake Michigan archipelago of islands. While exploring these islands, from Death&rsquo;s Door to the Garden Peninsula, the participants share a watery experience. 

The satellite images are an animation of actual Earth and sun weather data collected over months using the web. The images are refreshed daily to form a 3D visual history. The 3D models of the archipelago of islands are based on video images taken while kayaking. The 3D information has been extracted from the moving video images to allow participants to move about and explore these worlds. In the end, the world dissolves into moving water. 

Daniel J. Sandin is director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His early interest in real-time computer graphics / video image processing and interactive computing environments motivated his pioneering work in video synthesizers and continues to influence his research interests. 

Sandin&rsquo;s research interests include: virtual environments, digital libraries, scientific visualization, new methodologies for informal science and engineering education, paradigms for information display, televisualization (distributed graphics over networks), algorithm optimization for massively parallel computing, sonification, human / computer interfaces, and abstract mathematical visualization. He is receiving recognition, along with EVL co-director Tom DeFanti, for conceiving the CAVE virtual reality theater in 1991. 

Sandin&rsquo;s computer / video art has been exhibited at conferences and museums worldwide, and he has received many awards. Sandin has received grants and fellowships from such distinguished organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and, his work is included in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Recent virtual reality works include Poverty Island and Gallery of Motions.

Looking for Water

Home is an interactive, navigable virtual-reality environment that explores ideas about dwelling and its relation to the psyche. In it, a house abandoned by its owners, is up for sale. Half-empty spaces still reverberate with memories and the most private moments of its previous inhabitants. Deceptively normal looking from the outside, once inside, spaces stretch and break apart and walls fall away, leaving only a small plateau hanging in emptiness, resounding with the lives and voices of those who still haunt it. 

The rooms and hallways include a soundscape composed of spoken narrative fragments and a musical ambient score. Immersants may encounter the ghostly presence of other voyagers in the space, and may leave a recording of their voice for future visitors. 

Home began as an on-line VRML environment, and was remade for the CAVE&reg; environment. It contains links to the work of numerous artists who reflect on the meaning of domestic space and identity, including a screenwriter, photographer, set designer, film and video makers, and computer artists. Each brings a unique perspective on the meaning of home, this most universal and basic of necessities. 

Credits 
Drew Browning and Annette Barbier, major artist / designers> 
Geoffrey Allen Baum, programming and VRML-CAVE conversion 
John Loesel, composer 
Dave Tolchinsky, screenwriter 
Reid Perkins-Buzo, technical assistant 
Sam Ball, theatrical consultant 
Voices: Linda Gates, Delle Chatman, David Downs, Rives Collins, Molly Sullivan, Dan Brintz 

Contributors 
Melinda Levin, Karla Berry, Barbara Bird, Art Nomura, Michelle Citron, Paul Hertz, Ondrea Delio, Laura Kissel, Harlan Wallach, Deb Diehl, Shawn Decker, Diane Hagamann

Home

PAAPAB is a networked virtual dance floor with a steady dance beat. The user joins the dance by selecting one or more life-sized puppets whose movements mirror that of the user&rsquo;s body movements through a simple motion capture system. As more users join in the dance, the floor gets more crowded. 

The CAVE&trade; is equipped with a tracking sensor for the user&rsquo;s head and either one or two arms. PAAPAB uses this data to create the puppets&rsquo; realistic dance motions. 

Each puppet shape varies, and the trackers are mapped to their body parts in different ways. Hence, the user may move her arms while the puppet moves its legs, tail or wings. 

Over time, a diverse group of animated puppets inhabit the virtual dance floor. At each networked site, a local heartbeat keeps the dancers and the dance floors in sync with one another.

Users interact with PAAPAB

PAAPAB

Super Spectacular is an immersive virtual-reality environment that presents different spectator arenas for users to interact: sports stadium, art gallery, corporate outreach and others. Each specific person who journeys through the environment creates a unique trail of footprints that may persist for several executions of the application.

Super Spectacular

syn.aesthetic is a virtual-reality environment where a 3D score is created by the sonic input of the participants. 

This &ldquo;objectified&rdquo; sound manifests as a visible, virtual object that maintains the location, dynamism and organic qualities of the audible sound, but persists beyond the lifetime of the sound. 

Participants are able to create their own sound sculpture by adding and deleting sounds. Each user leaves their own trace in the space, contributing to a larger sculpture, or score, representative of the collaborative effort of all participants over time. 

The disconnect between sonic creation and visual composition should lead to a new kind of creation possible only in this kind of environment; a living sculpture, where sound is the physical material and the material is ethereal.

syn.aesthetic

La Bo&icirc;te is a networked virtual environment where visitors are invited to see short dance performances on video screens. 

In the virtual dance studio, visitors can view brief performances, than try to imitate them or leave their own traces of a performance. The piece places some emphasis on classical ballet training and the importance of the geography of the classical dance studio. 

This project was inspired by a decade-long friendship, and our mutual love of dance, performance and technology. 

Credits 
Concept, 3D modeling and composition, video / sound editing, Marientina Gotsis 
Performance and inspiration, Irina Poulou 
Technical assistance / node creation, Dave Pape, Josephine Anstey, Geoffrey Baum, Shalini Venkataraman