Dave Pape

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo · Department of Media Study

The Trail is an interactive drama running on an immersive VR system. Imagine Tarkovsky's Stalker, crossed with Alice Through the Looking Glass, crossed with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Now imagine embarking on a guided journey through this warped yet familiar landscape. Your guides are two intelligent agents, Patofil and Filopat. We consider a...

Objective: Delay of gratification, or the extent to which one can resist the temptation of an immediate reward and wait for a larger reward later, is a self-regulatory skill that predicts positive outcomes. The aim of this research was to conduct initial tests of the effects of a board game designed to increase children's delay of gratification vi...

We discuss the development of WoyUbu, an intermedia theatrical performance. The mixing of media and theatre can take many forms. In this paper, we specifically explore the use of video-games within a play, to expand audience involvement with the drama, while still aiming to present a traditional, scripted storyline.

Improvising Conscious: Davian Bead Game is an experimental work of intermedia performance: a cognitive science fiction which addresses questions of situated consciousness and pre- & post-human identity. The core of Improvising Conscious: Davian Bead Game is game played with an alien intelligence, and a lecture by Jennifer Arnstay, Professor of Mate...

Improvising Consciousness: The Davian Turn is an experimental work of intermedia performance: a cognitive science fiction which addresses questions of situated consciousness, pre- & post-human identity, and creativity. The core of Improvising Consciousness: The Davian Turn project is a performative lecture by Jennifer Årnstay, Professor of Material...

Improvising Consciousness is an experimental work of intermedia performance: a cognitive science fiction which addresses questions of situated consciousness, pre- & post-human identity, and creativity. The core of the Improvising Consciousness project is a performative lecture on the history and future of the human mind. The lecture is typically ac...

In this paper we discuss Mrs. Squandertime, a real-time, persistent simulation of a virtual character, her living room, and the view from her window, designed to be a wall-size, projected art installation. Through her large picture window, the eponymous Mrs. Squandertime watches the sea: boats, clouds, gulls, the tide going in and out, people on th...

The deployment of virtual characters in intermedia performance drives divergent agendas of this research group. From the perspective of performance studies, we examine the effect of computer-based characters as actors and believe explorations of mediated agency can open up new forms of engagement for live productions. From the visualisation point o...

Office Diva is a simulation of a monstrous ego; whining and writhing as she obsesses over her life. We see her as a fiery homunculus or dripping rain cloud barely holding together. We hear her stream-of-consciousness rant, and it becomes clear that this is a disturbed mind trapped by its own solipsistic and unreal processing of daily events.

Human Trials is simultaneously a public/private and embodied/disembodied performance. One user enters an immersive virtual environment and is led on an absurd quest. The challenges appear to be about control and the choices one makes in using power; but the games are rigged, the characters are duplicitous, the quest is a decoy, and the underlying t...

Human Trials is simultaneously a public/private and embodied/disembodied performance. One user enters an immersive virtual environment and is led on an absurd quest. The challenges appear to be about control and the choices one makes in using power; but the games are rigged, the characters are duplicitous, the quest is a decoy, and the underlying t...

"Human Trials" is a networked, virtual, intermedia drama with human actors, intelligent agents and smart sets. The drama explores the intersection of virtual reality and embodied performance through an event designed both as an immersive experience for one participant, and as a non-immersive production for a live audience. This structural duality h...

We describe the creation of virtual "Art Volant" ("flying art"), a virtual reality extension of kite art by Jackie Matisse. Past exhibitions of Matisse's kites have involved either static real-world kites, or pre-recorded films of the kites in motion. Through the use of VR, gallery patrons are able to fly kites themselves, enhancing their appreciat...

This panel presentation will exhibit artwork developed in CAVEs and discuss how art methodologies enhance the science of VR through collaboration, interaction and aesthetics. Artists and scientists work alongside one another to expand scientific research and artistic expression and are motivated by exhibiting collaborative virtual environments. Loo...

The Trial The Trailis an interactive drama running on an im- mersive VR system. Imagine Tarkovsky's Stalker, crossed with Alice Through the Looking Glass, crossed with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Now imagine embarking on a guided journey through this warped yet familiar landscape. Your guides are two intelligent agents, Patofil and Filopat. We...

We are demonstrating several intelligent agents built accord-ing to the MGLAIR (Modal Grounded Layered Architec-ture with Integrated Reasoning) agent architecture. The top layer of MGLAIR is implemented in SNePS and its acting subsystem, SNeRE (the SNePS Rational Engine). The ma-jor demonstration will be act 3 of The Trial The Trail, an interactive...

This course teaches the details of building a moderate-cost, single-screen projection-based virtual reality system. It will cover the basics of virtual reality - stereoscopy, tracking, audio - and the options for implementing them with commodity hardware. Open source software to drive the system will also be discussed.

We present a real-time hybrid tracking system thatintegrates gyroscopes and line-based vision trackingtechnology. Gyroscope measurements are used topredict orientation and image line positions.Gyroscope drift is corrected by vision tracking.System robustness ...

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Ygdrasil is a programming framework for creating networked, multi-user virtual worlds, especially interactive artistic worlds. It provides a shared scene graph, a plug-in system for adding new behaviors, and a high-level script interface for composing these worlds. We describe the architecture of Ygdrasil, and its use in creating two applications t...

In advancing our capabilities in the realm of virtual reality, the development of haptic technology has been a rate-limiting factor in producing tactile sensations directly onto the human hands. The Living Anatomy Program seeks to obviate the need for such technology by designing physical objects based on anatomic components that feel realistic to...

We present a novel point-based rendering approach based on object-space point interpolation. We introduce the concept of a transformation-invariant covariance matrix of a set of points to efficiently determine splat sizes in a multiresolution hierarchy. ...

This paper describes the construction of a single screen, projection-based VR display using commodity, or otherwise low-cost, components. The display is based on Linux PCs, and uses polarized stereo. Our aim is to create a system that is accessible to the many museums and schools that do not have large budgets for exploring new technology. In const...

In this paper, we describe a CAVE VR application, The Thing Growing, which is designed to engage the user in an emotional relationship with a computer-controlled character in the context of a fictional narrative. We discuss the process of building an interactor-centered virtual drama and assess The Thing Growing.

Immersive, interactive virtual reality is a tool with hypothetically limitless uses. However, so far it has been put to serious use primarily in technical application areas such as computational science, automotive engineering, and chemical exploration. Groups working in these fields often have large budgets and can afford expensive, advanced displ...

As part of the iGrid Research Demonstration at INET 2000, we created two Virtual Cultural Heritage environments -- "Virtual Harlem" and "Shared Miletus". The purpose of these applications was to explore possibilities in using the combination of high-speed international networks and virtual reality (VR) displays for cultural heritage education. Our...

Shared Miletus is a networked Virtual Cultural Heritage application rst demonstrated at the INET 2000 conference. In this application we sought to explore new tools and techniques, ones that could be useful to create a networked virtual environment which takes the place of a traditional museum. This paper describes the software used to build the en...

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has developed an aggressive program over the past decade to partner with scores of computational scientists and engineers all over the world. The focus of this effort has been to create visualization and virtual reality (VR) devices and applications for col...

We present a collection of heuristics and simple tests for evaluating the quality of a projection-based virtual reality display. A typical VR system includes numerous potential sources of error. By understanding the characteristics of a correctly working system, and the types of errors that are likely to occur, users can quickly determine if their...

We describe an end-to-end latency measurement method for virtual environments. The method incorporates a video camera to record both a physical controller and the corresponding virtual cursor at the same time. The end-to-end latency can be concluded based on the analysis of the playback of the videotape. The only hardware necessary is a standard in...

The PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System) is a new VR display device that was first prototyped as a virtual device in a CAVE, to aid in the development process. This initial prototyping in VR allowed the designers to save time and money, and to garner valuable feedback from prospective users, before finally committing the design to ha...

In this paper we discuss issues involved in creating art and cultural heritage projects in Virtual Reality with particular reference to one interactive narrative, "The Thing Growing". In the first section we will briefly discuss the potential of VR as a medium for the production of art and the interpretation of culture. In the second section we des...

This paper describes “The Thing Growing”, a work of interactive fiction implemented in virtual reality, in which the user is the main protagonist and interacts with computer controlled characters. This work of fiction depends on the user's emotional investment in the story and on her relationship to a central character, the Thing

In this paper we present a virtual reality mail (VR-mail) system to support asynchronous collaborations in virtual environments. In the asynchronous collaboration, efficient handing off of messages to participants in different places and time is crucial. We try to support this type of collaborations by combining speech and gesture in a message. The...

The Thing Growing is a virtual Frankenstein experiment: an attempt to create a Thing with a will and personality of its own, who engages us in a virtual world.

In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of a plasma display panel for a wide field of view desktop virtual reality environment. Present commercial plasma displays are not designed with virtual reality in mind, leading to several problems in generating stereo imagery and obtaining good tracking information. Although we developed solut...

This paper describes an architecture for virtual reality software which transparently supports a number of physical display systems and stereoscopic methods. Accurate, viewer- centered perspective projections are calculated, and graphics display options are set, automatically, independent of application code. The design is intended to allow greater...

We present a virtual mail (v-mail) system. The prototype system is developed to realize efficient “handing-off” of work between, participants that are separated by great distances and/or time zones

The paper discusses a virtual mail system. V-mail is designed to be used in the CAVE virtual environment. The participants' mail messages and the ongoing modifications of the VE are maintained by a central server. V-mail's user interface is embodied in a virtual friend or pet that follows the participant as he/she interacts with the VE

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 grap...

Introduction GraphPack is an educational package 5 developed at Rensselaer that provides users with the capability to study and visualize graph theoretic algorithms. The graphical user interface is built on X windows. This application can manipulate both digraphs and graphs, and can draw them under different embeddings. GraphPack itself is composed...

This CAVE User's Guide contains all the information an application developer needs to successfully create a CAVE experience. A description of the CAVE virtual reality system (Chapter 2) A list of the hardware components, particularly those with which a programmer should be concerned (Chapters 3 & 4) A description of the CAVE software library (Chap...

Virtual reality (VR) can be defined as interactive computer graphics that provides viewer-centered perspective, large field of view and stereo. Head-mounted displays (HMDs) and BOOMs™ achieve these features with small display screens which move with the viewer, close to the viewer's eyes. Projection-based displays [3, 7], supply these characteristi...

Simulating virtual reality (VR) hardware allows programs to be written in a desktop environment without constant use of limited VR resources. Rather than shifting constantly between VR and workstation environments, developers at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) wanted to be able to test VR applications on the normal workstation console...

This compilation video contains visualizations of Earth and Space Sciences resulting from supercomputer models. The excerpted visualizations include: Ocean Planet, El Nino, Ozone 1991, Clouds, Changes in Glacier Bay, Alaska, Biosphere, Lunar Topography from the Clementine Mission, Musculoskeletal Modeling Dynamic Simulations, Simulations of the Bre...

In this paper, we describe dierent methods for three dimensional embedding of graphs, as well as a two dimensional layout method, namely barycentric embedding. In addition, we present a program for automatic recognition of graphs. We finally describe servers for graph drawing routines that can be called from C or C++ programs and applications such...

In this paper, we describe different methods for three dimensional embedding of graphs, as well as a two dimensional layout method, namely barycentric embedding. In addition, we present a program for automatic recognition of graphs. We finally describe servers for graph drawing routines that can be called from C or C++ programs and applications suc...

The Scientific Visualization Studio is a part of the Scientific Applications and Visualization Branch of the Space Data and Computing Division at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. It is tasked to provide advanced data visualization support to users of the NASA Center for the Computational Sciences and other NASA funded scientific researchers in...

We present a fully networked system for visually monitoring and editing scientific data across a wide variety of platforms and graphics environments. The software that we introduce provides a cross-platform, collaborative environment to view and modify data. Our solution allows for an immersive display of structures in a CAVE virtual reality enviro...

This paper describes "The Trial The Trail" a work of interactive drama for a projection-based virtual reality system. The project marries a virtual reality authoring system and an artificial intelligence system.

The Thing Growing is a CAVE ® virtual reality artwork designed to promote an emotional relationship between a user and a computer−controlled character, the Thing. The application uses literary and dramatic techniques to form a context for the growth of the relationship and as the basis for the construction of the computer character's intelligence.

In this paper, we describe narrative and ludic structures that support interactive drama in immersive virtual reality.

We provide an overview of the use of intelligent agents, implemented in the new MGLAIR architecture, in a virtual reality drama. For us, a virtual reality drama is a scripted play in which the computational agents are actors who have copies of the script, and one human audience member has been drafted to be a participant, but doesn't have a copy of...

Akin to a living creature, Earths land, air, oceans, ice, and life fit together into a complex, interlocking system. Space affords a unique vantage point from which to observe the daily, seasonal, and annual changes in Earths systems. Using data from advanced satellites, NASA visualizations portray a majestic, and sometimes violent, natural world a...