Museum Virtual Worlds

This past year, we’ve been seeing more and more physical devices connected to objects and avatars in SL, adding further complexity to mixed reality and augmented reality environments for exhibits and installations.

Artists have often been at the forefront of interfacing the real and the virtual and in exploring the grey zones where these worlds meet. New media arist and sculptor Joe Delappe re-enacted Ghandi’s historic Salt March of 1930, a protest against the British tax on salt at the time. At a gallery in New York and in Second Life this past March and April, Joe walked 240 miles on a treadmill he connected to SL to control his avatar MGandhi Chakrabarti’s virtual world steps, recreating the march. As much a performance as an installation, his work demonstrates the interesting time displacement effects and physical connections that are possible when RL elements are combined with telepresence and virtual environments. We often think of things in a virtual sense as being instantenous, so it’s somewhat jarring to put something like the slower speed of a real person walking next to flying avatars. With a nod to the Slow Food and Slow Art movements, real/virtual connections like this might allow us to savor our virtual interactions a bit more.

To create immersive experiences in 3D virtual worlds, developers craft objects and scenes that offer compelling visuals and interactions. These elements, along with sounds, lighting design, animated objects, and avatars can all work together to stimulate senses and allow people to control aspects of the virtual environment. We naturally want to use more of our senses to experience and manipulate these digital worlds though, which is where stereoscopic displays, motion tracking, and haptics comes in. Interfaces like these are important to exhibit designers in museums. They allow us to to create physically engaging experiences with minimal technical interface barriers for visitors to use them.

From time to time, we see some great prototype technologies in each of these areas as they apply to virtual worlds (remember the data glove?) and occasionally new research emerges that seems like we can begin to distance ourselves from the keyboards, mice, and flat screen devices that are not the best interfaces for being seamlessly immersed.

With their Hands Free 3D r&d project, veteran technologist Mitch Kapor and Phillippe Bossut are developing a new way to interact with worlds like Second Life. Using a 3D camera designed by 3DV Systems, they’ve developed a custom SL client that allows users to operate SL without using a mouse or a keyboard. The system uses a webcam-like camera that captures the depth of objects in front of it (including a person) and using the modified client translates the person’s actual motion to the motion of an avatar to allow the person to walk or fly through SL by literally walking in front of the camera. Their goal is to make the interface to virtual worlds more natural and they expect this ease of use to make virtual worlds more appealing. Check out this video.