— wearable computing

VRML + Art

VRML + Design

VRML + Performing Arts
 

VRML: the technology

Multi-User worlds

> Wearable computing

Visual Assistant
 

Project output

Project conclusions

Below you will find some information on these technologies.

Motion capture in theatre

• MidiDancer   MidiDancer is a sensory device developed by artistic director Mark Coniglio that allows the movements of a performer to control media devices within the stage space.   MidiDancer consists of eight sensors built into a costume and placed at strategic locations around the body, e.g., the elbow or knee. As these joints bend, the movement of the sensors is measured by a tiny microcomputer and the information encoded into a form that can be sent via a radio transmitter. Offstage there is a receiver/decoder which is connected to a Macintosh computer running a software program called Interactor.
• Steim  Has several products including:
• LiSa  (Live Sampling): a real-time audio manipulation environment that runs on Apple Macintosh.
• BigEyeis a Macintosh program designed to take video information and convert it into Midi messages.  It allows tracking of objects through space.
• Image/ine is a Macintosh program that allows a user to manipulate visual source material in a live performance environment. Video sampling and playback, keying, displacement and other effects are available with video (live and recorded), 
• Intelligent Stage at the The Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University.
• Touch sensitive dance floor  at the University of Texas ... is just what it says it is.

 

• Nathalie Jeremijenko
• Jeffrey Shaw
• Stelarc

VR technologies

• Data Gloves: the Nintendo/Mattel PowerGlove is described in an article by Chris Hand.
• Wearable computing.  A raof products from Bristol University including CyberJacket and BlazerJet.
• Head mounted displays (HMDs) - vrHeadsets sells entry-level HMDs and will hire them out for special events (HMD based on a pair of I-glasses LC and and InterSense Inter Trax 30).
• Robots: a site which describes how to build them.
• Electronics: This is an ftp site for the circuit cookbook with lots of stuff of use to the artist and designer who wants to start integrating hardware/software.
• Geo-positioning: GeoVRML is an effort to provide support for representing and visualizing geographic data using standard VRML97
• U-Wear:  product design work on wearable computers which includes sketches, model photos and very short text.
• CAVE: The CAVE is a projection based virtual reality system aimed at providing immersion.  You can find out about the original CAVE Virtual Reality System and examine various Cave environments re-written in VRML.
• Many (Virtual) Reality Centres are in the public domain and are accessible for artists and 
• designers. They include large format curved screens up to 20 metres across and 4 metres high and involve some form of integral interactive device.  See, for example, the Virtual Reality Centre at the University of Teesside.
• The DOME gives a 180 by 180 degree field of view and is about 6 metres to 8 metres across. 

Reality Centres and DOMEs, like the Hemispherium™ at the University ofTeesside, provide mulit-user, immersive and interactive environments. in which VRML environments can be viewed.

VR information

• VR (general) Chris Hand will introduce you to VR. this site decsribes hardware and software to get you going. 
• VVECC (The Visualization and Virtual Environments Community Club) hold some very interesting one-day events on a variety of VR topics and they are are well documented.

• Costello, P.J. (1997)  Health and safety issues associated with virtual reality: a review of current literature.   JISC Advisory Group on Computer Graphics, Technical Report No.37.  [HTML]

Some reading ...

• Argyle, M. (1975)  Bodily communication, second edition. Methuen & Co. Ltd., London, UK.
• Baudel, T. and Baudoin-Lafon, M. (1993)  Charade: remote control of objects using free-hand gestures.  Communication of the ACM 36(7) pp. 28-35.
• Benford et al. (1997) Embodiments, Avatars, Clones and Agents for Multi-User, Multisensory Virtual Worlds, Multimedia Systems, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Germany.
• Bolt, R.A. (1980) Put that there: voice and gesture at the graphics interface. Computer Graphics 14 pp.262-270.
• Capin, T.K. (1997) The HUMANOID environment for interactive animation  of multiple deformable human characters, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, March 1997, 
• Cruz-Neira, C., Sandin, D.J. and DeFanti, T.A. (1993), Surround-screen Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE, in Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH '93, Anaheim, CA.
• Davies, C. (1998)  Osmose: notes on being in immersive space.  Digital Creativity 9(2) 65?74.
• Davis, J. and Shah, M. (1994) Visual gesture recognition. IEEE Proceedings Visual Image Signal Processing 141(2) pp.101-106.
• Fels, S.S. (1990) Building adaptive interfaces with neural networks: the Glove-Talk Project study. PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, unpublished.
• Hauptmann, A.G. (1989)  Speech and gestures for graphic image manipulation. Proceedings of CHI'89, May 1989, pp.241-245.
• Hull, Richard; Neaves, Philip; Bedford-Roberts, James (1997) Towards Situated Computing. Hewlett-Packard Technical Report HPL-97-66 [HTML]
• Konneker, L.K.  (1984) Graphical interaction technique which uses gestures. Proceedings of the IEEE First International Conference on Office Automation, New Orleans, LA, USA, pp. 51-55.
• Kruegger, M.W. (1991)  Artificial reality II. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, USA.
• Mann, S. (1997)  Smart Clothing: The " Wearable Computer" and WearCam... [HTML]
• Weimer, D. and Ganapathy,  S.K. (1989) A synthetic visual environment with hand gesturing and voice input. Proceedings of CHI'89, May 1989, pp.235-240.
• Zimmerman, T.G.,  Lanier, J.Z., Blanchard, C, Bryson, S. and Harvill, Y. (1987)  A hand gesture interface device. Proceedings CHI + GI '87, pp. 189-192.