From: rob tow Subject: ONLINE: archive of Brenda Laurel's "Placeholder" VR project Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 18:45:30 -0700 Message-ID: <31BCCFBA.5042@interval.com> Organization: Interval Research Corp. The "Placeholder" Virtual Reality project, produced by Interval Research Corporation and The Banff Centre, and directed by Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland (with collaboration with Michael Naimark, and implementation lead by John Harrison and Rob Tow), explored a new paradigm for narrative action in virtual environments. The geography of Placeholder took inspiration from three actual locations in the Banff National Park - a cave, a waterfall, and a formation of weathered earthern spires overlooking a river. Three-dimensional videographic scene elements, spatialized sounds and voices, and embodiment as petroglyphic spirit animals were employed to construct a composite landscape that could be visited concurrently by two physically remote participants wearing head-mounted displays, who were guided by a disembodied "Voice of the Goddess" as they walked about, conversed, used both hands to touch and move virtual objects, and recorded fragments of their own narratives in the three worlds. This installation, which used one of the first production Silicon Graphics Reality Engines, and made heavy use of Crystal River Engineering Convolvotrons, ran for only a week. Now an extensive archive of "Placeholder" is available both on the World Wide Web, and as a CD-ROM. This archive is composed of over 550 megabytes of working papers, design specs, video clips and pictures of the design process and the performances, sounds, post-production published papers, participant interviews, and much more. To explore the worlds of "Placeholder", please visit the Web archive at: http://www.interval.com/projects/placeholder/ -r- R o b T o w tow@interval.com tauzero@well.com Interval Research Corp. http://www.well.com/www/tauzero/ 1801 Page Mill Road POB 51748 Building C Palo Alto, CA 94303 Palo Alto, CA USA 94304 Voice: (415)-842-6051 Fax: (415)-354-0872 * http://www.interval.com/ * * All thoughts are not words; * thinking so is an error - * misconstructed Self. * *