This is a survey of several pieces that showed in the Touchware Gallery at SIGGRAPH 98, and were put in the category of interactive installation. I&rsquo;m interested in discussing the issues and problems that these artists are dealing with by making, or because they make, interactive work, especially since I am in the process of making my own interactive art piece. The pieces were, Case Study 309, Tammy Knipp; Telematic Vision, Paul Sermon; WorldSkin, Maurice Benayoun; Items 1-2000, Paul Vanouse; The Bush Soul, Rebecca Allen and the Emergence Team; and Iconica, Troy Innocent. My piece is called The Thing Growing.

Are you Waving or Drowning? Art, Interaction, Manipulation and Complexity

In this paper we describe a software system for building interactive virtual environments, particularly ones for virtual reality art works. It is meant to allow teams composed of experienced programmers and non-programming designers to work together on projects. It is an object-oriented framework, built upon existing toolkits for VR, real-time graphics, and audio. A number of common application features and tools are provided, simplifying world creation.

A Virtual Tour Guide in

XP: An Authoring System for Immersive Art Exhibitions

CAVERNsoft is an architecture for creating Tele-Immersive applications, with the goal of making synchronous and asynchronous trans-oceanic collaboration a routine matter. This paper briefly discusses CAVERNsoft and then discusses several applications that have been built using CAVERNsoft with a focus on those with trans-oceanic concepts.

User in an Asynchronous Collaborative Session

Multi-disciplinary Experiences with CAVERNsoft Tele-Immersive Applications

This &ldquo;Late Breaking Hot Topic Paper&rdquo; describes the LIMBO / VTK a tool that allows developers to quickly build collaborative visualization applications for CAVE, ImmersaDesk as well as desktop workstations. LIMBO / VTK is based on two broadly used technologies: CAVERNsoft, a library for supporting collaborative Virtual Reality, and the Visualization Toolkit, an extensive library for supporting 3D graphics and visualization.

Inside a Sample LIMBO / VTK World

LIMBO / VTK: A Tool for Rapid Tele-Immersive Visualization

Preliminary STAR TAP&#8480; Tele-Immersion Experiments between Chicago and Singapore.

&ldquo;COVE&rdquo; Application Cooperative Tele-Operative Task

Preliminary STAR TAP&#8480; Tele-Immersion Experiments between Chicago and Singapore

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has partnered with dozens of computational scientists and engineers to create visualization and virutal relaity (VR) devices and applications for collaborative exploration of scientific and engineering data. Since 1995, our research and development activities have incorporated emerging highbandwidth networks like the vBNS and the Internet2 in an effot now called Tele-Immersion. 

As a result of our six years&rsquo; experience in building first and second generation VR devices to support these applications, we consider third-generation VR devices that will provide desktop / office-sized displays. Since no current tehcnology is yet configurable with ideal resolution and size, we will first simulate these devices with available parts, and then build more advanced prototypes. We believe that the devices we propose to build using the new display technologies from a set of desirable human / computer interface requirements for successful Tele-Immersion adoption. A goal of this research is to develop clearly compelling prototyypes so that these devices can be improved and reproduced by the private sector.

Artist&rsquo;s Rendition of ImmersaDesk3

Personal Tele-Immersion Devices

Application Experiences with the Globus Toolkit.

Application Experiences with the Globus Toolkit

Art will become innovative in the medium of virtual environments when the spectator abandons the act of mere viewing, transcends simple narrative participation and bursts into the scene as an active creator. &ldquo;Strait Dope&rdquo; is a CAVE virtual art environment that offers an opportunity to participate in a room size projective construction. The nonlinear nonhierarchical structure of &ldquo;Strait Dope&rdquo; stages a stream of consciousness movement that is simultaneously subversive and confrontational.

Still from

Virtual Environment as Rebus

&ldquo;Las Meninas&rdquo; is a virtual reality artwork created for the CAVE. The painting of the same title, &ldquo;Las Meninas&rdquo; or &ldquo;The Maids of Honor&rdquo; (1656), by the great Spanish painter Diego Velazquez, challenges the viewer with its allegorical subject matter and enigmatic mise-en-scene. From the outset the viewer confronts the artist&rsquo;s canvas which is forever hidden from view. The viewer desires to see what is hidden from him and at the same time witnesses a mise-en-scene which carries within itself multiple allegorical meanings&hellip;

Las Meninas: The Articulation of Vision

When designing projection-based virtual reality devices, the integration of LCD shutter glasses, high-end graphics computers, and large-scale video projectors can be difficult. We describe four common problems and their solutions.

Stereo Video Display with Correct Separation

Optimizing Stereo Video Formats for Projection Based Virtual Reality

Tele-Immersion, the union of networked virtual reality and video to support collaboration among scientists, engineers, and educators, is an important element in the computing information infrastructure envisioned by the National Computational Science Alliance. Tele-Immersion will allow people from around the world to casually enter a shared virtual environment, manipulate that environment - whether its a scientific simulation or a design space, and engage in discourse with their collaborators.

Collaborative Session within &ldquo;NICE&rdquo; with SARA in The Netherlands

Multiway Tele-Immersion at Supercomputing &rsquo;97, or Why We Used $6,000,000 Worth of VR Equipment to do the Hokey Pokey

The Australian Great Barrier Reef is a natural wonder of our world and a registered UNESCO World Heritage site hosting 1.5 million visitor-days in 1994/95. Tourism is currently the main commercial use and is estimated to generate over $1 billion annually.[1] With the coming 2000 Olympics in Australia, tourism increases will substantially present a major conservation and preservation problem to the reef. This paper proposes a solution to this problem through establishing a virtual reality installation that is interactive and evolving, enabling many visitors to discover the reef through high quality immersive entertainment. This paper considers the technical implications required for a system based in Complexity: a distributed DOME and CAVE&reg; architectural system; a mixed reality environment; artificial life; multi-user interactivity; and hardware interfaces.

Overview of the Virtual Great Barrier Reef Installation

Virtual Great Barrier Reef: A Theoretical Approach Towards an Evolving, Interactive VR Environment Using a Distributed DOME and CAVE&reg; System

A discussion of the &ldquo;Las Meninas&rdquo; virtual reality project.

Still from Las Meninas

Las Meninas in VR: Storytelling and the Illusion in Art

Advances in technology have made it possible to create vast, rich, and architecturally intricate virtual worlds. The Mitologies project is an attempt to utilize this technology as a means of artistic expression and for the exploration of historical, political, musical, and visual narratives. Mitologies draws inspiration from a large pool of literary and artistic sources by capturing their intertwining relationships in a cinematic form, hence making connections to the strong narrative tradition of other media, such as film and literature.

The Geography Room of the

Mitologies: Medieval Labyrinth Narratives in Virtual Reality

Data Input Model for Virtual Reality-Aided Facility Layout

An overview and discussion of advanced visualization and virutal reality technology for education and research training apllications.

Advanced Electronic Visualization and Virtual Reality Technologies for Education and Research Training

The body that jacks into cyberspace is a sensory input / output device: the senses take in information from both the real world and simulated worlds, output from the senses control both real and virtual machinery. It is a techno-human hybrid, capable of linking directly into cyberspace and communicating with virtual beings it finds there. It is a farm for spare bio-parts. 

Contemporary electronic art practitioners are following this fantasy as they create cyber bodies. This paper will examine some of the technical and aesthetic strategies used in creating the electric body. It will check the work produced against the claims the artists are making in their attempt to realize the fantasy. Finally it will analyze the fantasy itself.

We Sing the Body Electric: Imagining the Body in Electronic Art

This paper describes a method for correcting static errors in the position component of a 6-degree-of-freedom tracker in a projection-based VR system. This method allows users to observe where errors in the environment are significant and correct them interactively. Later touch-up correction is possible as well. This technique is based on superimposing targets in physical space with their virtual images. The only hardware addition to the VR system required is a few precisely placed targets.

User and ImmersaDesk with Physical Targets

Line of Sight Method for Tracker Calibration in Projection-Based VR Systems

Teleimmersion is currently one of the most challenging areas of VR research. Networking adds a new dimension. For example, human-factors research in VR traditionally focuses on the development of more natural means of manipulating virtual objects and traversing virtual landscapes. However collaborative manipulation forces the consideration of how participants should interact with each other in a shared space, in addition to how co-manipulated objects should behave. There are also questions of how participants should be represented in the collaborative environment; how to effectively transmit non-verbal cues that real-world collaborators so casually use; how to best transmit video and audio via a channel that allows both public addressing as well as private conversations to occur; and how to sustain a virtual environment even when all its participants have left. 

Teleimmersion poses new challenges to traditional areas of networking and databases as well. Teleimmersive environments (TIEs) require an unconventionally broad range of networking, database and graphics capabilities to realize and sustain. This vast range makes the rapid construction of rich TIEs difficult. Past attempts at building networking and database architectures for Teleimmersion have resulted in adhoc solutions that are specifically designed to solve a small range of problems and hence little reusability was possible. Nevertheless, from these early attempts patterns began to emerge. In particular: the realization that the application domain can significantly impact the kind of networking topology and protocols needed to distribute the data; a tighter integration between networking and databases is needed to support long term teleimmersive applications; and multiple separable software layers are needed to allow application developers to rapidly create new teleimmersive applications, as well as to integrate teleimmersive capabilities into existing non-teleimmersive applications.

Software Infrastructure of CAVERNsoft

CAVERN and a Unified Approach to Support Realtime Networking and Persistence in Tele-immersion

The design, implementation, and testing of virtual environments is complicated by the concurrency and real-time features of these systems. Therefore, the development of formal methods for modeling and analysis of virtual environments is highly desirable. In the past, Petri-net models have led to good empirical results in the automatic verification of concurrent and real-time systems. We applied a timed extension of Petri nets to modeling and analysis of the CAVE virtual environment at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Here, we report on our time Petri nets model and on empirical studies that we conducted with the Cabernet toolset from Politenico di Milano. Our experiments uncovered a flaw in the way a shared buffer is used by the CAVE processes. Due to an erroneous synchronization on the buffer, different CAVE walls can simultaneously display images based on different input information. We conclude from our empirical studies that Petri-net-based tools can effectively support the development of reliable virtual environments.

Modeling and Analysis of a Virtual Reality System with Time Petri Nets

There is little principled empirical work to support the educational effectiveness of virtual reality (VR) because it is a new and fairly inaccessible medium. The purpose of the studies described in this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of a virtual environment, specifically an immersive virtual reality environment, as a learning medium in domains with a high conceptual and social content. The learning environment used is called NICE (Narrative-based, Immersive, Constructionist / Collaborative Environments), an immersive participatory virtual world for young users based on a constructivist approach to education, on collaborative learning, and on narrative development. NICE is designed to encourage exploration and experiential learning by utilizing the strengths of virtual reality: a combination of immersion, direct engagement, immediate visual feedback, and interactivity.

Evaluation of an Immersive Collaborative Virtual Learning Environment for K-12 Education

Virtual reality applications can use a wide variety of methods for animating. Flipbooks, keyframing, motion capture, and procedural (computer programmed) animation are all used. &ldquo;The Multi Mega Book in the CAVE&reg;,&rdquo; uses a flipbook of 3-D models to walk a wire-framed Judas out of da Vinci&rsquo;s painting of the Last Supper. In &ldquo;The Thing Growing&rdquo;, rocks come alive and chase the user. When a rock gets close enough, it rears up and swallows the user. In this case there are only four simple models and the CAVE morphs between them to produce the rock&rsquo;s growing and grabbing action&hellip;

Animation Stills from The Thing Growing

Animation in the CAVE&reg;

CAVERN, the CAVE&reg; Research Network, is an alliance of industrial and research institutions equipped with CAVEs, ImmersaDesks, and high performance computing resources, interconnected by high-speed networks to support collaboration in design, training, education, scientific visualization and computational steering, in virtual reality. Supported by advanced networking on both the national and international level, the CAVE reserach network is focusing on Tele-Immersion - the union of networked virutal reality and video in the context of significant computing and data mining.

Eddie Learning in the &ldquo;NICE&rdquo; Garden

CAVERN: The CAVE&reg; Research Network

This paper describes the NICE project, an immersive learning environment for children implemented in the CAVE and related multi-user virtual reality (VR) technologies. 

The NICE project provides an engaging setting where children construct and cultivate simple virtual ecosystems, collaborate via networks with other remotely-located children, and create stories from their interactions in the real and virtual world.

Jim (the avatar) and Eddie working together in the garden.

The NICE Project: Learning Together in a Virtual World

Estimation of Time Varying Delay Time in Non-Stationary Linear Systems: An Approach to Monitor Human Operator Adaptation in Manual Tracking Tasks

&ldquo;Strait Dope&rdquo; is a CAVE or ImmersaDesk virtual environment that emphasizes participant interaction. &ldquo;Strait Dope&rdquo; colors thought and decision making by presenting unfamiliar elements in settings which operate under an alternate logic. Participants discover their own path to confront a subversive world of colors, characters, voices and noises.

Publications - 1998

Are you Waving or Drowning? Art, Interaction, Manipulation and Complexity

XP: An Authoring System for Immersive Art Exhibitions

Multi-disciplinary Experiences with CAVERNsoft Tele-Immersive Applications

LIMBO / VTK: A Tool for Rapid Tele-Immersive Visualization

Preliminary STAR TAP℠ Tele-Immersion Experiments between Chicago and Singapore

Personal Tele-Immersion Devices

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