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CALVIN Environments

Another branch of the original House of the Future research involves the use of smart simulation to create environments that users can construct, test and modify. Smart simulations not only track people in the CAVE, but also follow their progress within a simulation so that the feedback makes sense to the user from within the environment and the user feels that she is influencing the progress of the simulation. The main audience for this research is architects and others concerned with the construction of a working space. In addition, this type of simulation goes beyond the shallowness of a demo and includes content that the users not only view or interact with passively, but can manipulate and change the environment to their liking, save it and retrieve it for later purposes. I have included a copy of the paper, ``Multi-perspective Collaborative Design in Persistent Networked Virtual Environments" that I co-authored with the primary researchers Jason Leigh and Andy Johnson in Appendix 2.

The main thrust of this research involves the use of multiple perspectives for architectural design and collaborative visualization in virtual reality. The concern is to apply virtual reality to the earlier, more creative, phases of the design process, rather than just as a walkthrough of the final design. CALVIN (Collaborative Architectural Layout Via Immersive Navigation) is a prototype interface that implements these ideas. One of the virtues of using virtual reality for such an application is the ability to provide the user with more than one perspective of an environment.

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Figure 17: A mortal's view of a world. High above one can see the avatar of the deity.

Typically, virtual reality simulations and demonstrations have depicted a space from an immersive perspective, the user sees the environment from within the space. This is known as the ``inside-out" perspective. CALVIN provides users with an alternative perspective. This notion of providing two perspectives for viewing is called ``mortals and deities." In the most trivial case, mortals view the world from an ``inside-out" perspective (figure 17) and deities view the

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Figure 18: A deity's miniaturized view of the same world of the above figure. The mortal is in the world.

world from an ``outside-in" perspective (figure  18). Both types of users can work together for, deities, due to the fact that they have a broad overall view of a space, can make gross changes to a space and mortals can make refinements on those changes since they are immersed in the space.

CALVIN also utilizes much of the graphics techniques, CAVE to CAVE software, and InYerFace Visor tools that were developed during the creation of the House of the Future. In the first experimental application of CALVIN, a scale model of a computer room at NCSA was reproduced in VR. The goal was to organize various computer workstations within the room. Currently, work is underway using CALVIN that will be on exhibit at the SuperComputing '95 conference.


next up previous
Next: Conclusion Up: Future of the House Previous: NICE Environments

Christina Vasilakis
Fri Nov 22 22:27:49 CST 1996