From: montefus@dsi.unimi.it (Diego Montefusco)
Subject: TECH: Dynamically changing environments
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 1995 17:49:28 +0100


From: montefus@dsi.unimi.it (Diego Montefusco)

Few weeks ago Alan Wexelblat asked about applications where the user
can dynamically change the world's structure. I did reply mentioning
the ARCANA project where the environment is parametrically built from
user's specs just before entering it.  I found something that gets
closer to what Alan asked.

Last weekend I attended a small but very good art-and-technology
conference in Venice, "Opera Totale", and one of the speakers,
Jean-Baptiste Barrier, head of the Pedagogy dept of IRCAM in Paris
(IRCAM is a very important music research center, part of the
contemporary art Centre George Pompidou) mentioned one collaboration
his center had with a french artist, Michael Benayoun (spelling?).

This application is called "Tunnel" and a video has been shown with
two users, one in Paris and the other in Toronto, linked via ISDN;
each of them would start within a simple underground sphere-like cave
and could start moving in ANY direction, digging its underground path,
trying to find the other one, and thereby building up a very complex
maze. The model is updated in real time, both locally and on the other
networked machine.  Furthermore the walls of these caves and tunnels
were filled with icons and images of both french and canadian
culture. Benayoun is not new to this "digging" applications and had
previously done two others (shown at the conference as well), but the
user was confined in the XY plane; "Tunnel" was by far the most
astounishing... At the end the caves built were wonderfully
complex... The applications was running on a SGI Onyx RE2, and was
screen based. I don't know about the navigation device and I don't
even know how many processors the machine had, but I don't think that
computing all those intersections on the fly is a trivial
task... IRCAM provided the rich sound-scape.

Hope this was interesting,

diego