Report on Session 4

24 Nov

 

Dear ICAT Students,

 

Hello!

 

The 4th session of the Seminar occurred this

past Friday, 21 Nov.  Some notes about what was

discussed are below.

 

The next session is scheduled for this coming

Friday, 28 Nov -- again at 6pm, meeting at

Classroom 3.

 

We will be discussing the below, with updates

and additions -- plus pages 50-60 of both

_Artificial Reality_ and _Hero with a Thousand

Faces_.

 

As always, people who have not attended

previous sessions are most welcome to attend.

 

___

 

 

The central themes of the Seminar are now coming

into focus.  It seems that these themes will be

developed in this Seminar between now and July.

 

In the 4th session, we observed and discussed a

number of examples of virtual meeting rooms --

for watching TV shows together, business meetings,

and other types of gatherings.

 

We marveled at how avatars can now appear as

live-action 3D “holographic” images of ourselves

(or of how we might choose to look for the occasion).

 

We discussed the implications of these developments

for the future of "“social media"”, also known as

“"online social networking"” --

Facebook/Myspace/Orkut

MEETS Second Life (avatars in virtual meeting places)

MEETS Youtube (video recordings)

MEETS Skype/etc (video chatting) --

with the option to do all of this on a mobile

communication device, of course!

 

We noted how Myron Krueger began experiments

(called Videoplace) to enable people to meet,

play, and work together in virtual environments

over 30 years ago -- and wrote about them in

his book, _Artificial Reality_.  Those experiments

involved automatic interactivity between a video

representation of one’'s self (which could be called,

one'’s avatar) and a computer-generated environment.

That is, one could (through one'’s avatar) join

others in a virtual space in which one could use

one'’s body movements to control one’'s avatar,

and the behavior of one'’s avatar could create

and manipulate elements of the computer-generated

environment.

 

This sort of thing has been known as “motion-capture” --

but in this case it is not done for designers to feed

images into a computer for the purpose of creating

a game or movie.  In this case, rather, it is a

process by which people at home can affect virtual

computer-generated environments through their body

movements.

 

In virtual environments -- as fascinating as the

technology is in itself, and as interesting it is

to just interact with others in an unstructured

manner -- it seems there might still sometimes be

a need for entertainment.

 

We once again noted that the story outline

recommended in _Hero with a Thousand Faces_

involves a hero or heroine who isolates him/

herself from society, gets in touch with the

divine/nature/self, and then brings back to

society the special knowledge he/she has learned.

Thus, this hero/heroine unblocks the barrier

that had been separating normal life, and the

cosmic source of energy and wisdom.  The book'’s

upcoming chapters concern the hero/heroine'’s

call to action, and helpers and obstacles

along the way.

 

It does seem that many people at home want

to have the option to join in the story action

through their avatars, and role-play -- whether

this is considered as game-playing, audience-

participation drama, or anything else.  It is

our challenge to help engineer such posssible

experiences.

 

We are looking forward to experimenting with

Nintendo’'s wii system, and to visiting game arcades.

The hope was expressed that ICAT might eventually

develop information-exchanges with individuals,

colleges, and businesses which 1) design combinations

of input devices and software, such as for sensitive

floors, electro-magnetic sensing environments,

wearable sensors in gloves, single or multiple

video cameras, etc (including electrical engineering

labs); and 2) design virtual environments on the

Internet.

 

Many thanks,

 

- Prof E

 

98403 94282