From jjl@cs.brown.edu Wed May 20 19:07:42 1998 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu (root@burdell.cc.gatech.edu [130.207.3.207]) by lennon.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id TAA28424 for ; Wed, 20 May 1998 19:07:41 -0400 (EDT) Received: from cs.brown.edu (cs.cs.brown.edu [128.148.32.2]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id TAA25658 for ; Wed, 20 May 1998 19:07:39 -0400 (EDT) Received: from snark.cs.brown.edu (snark.cs.brown.edu [128.148.31.158]) by cs.brown.edu (8.8.5/8.7.1) with ESMTP id TAA01405 for ; Wed, 20 May 1998 19:07:07 -0400 (EDT) From: Joseph LaViola Received: (jjl@localhost) by snark.cs.brown.edu (8.8.5/BrownCS1.0) id TAA15019 for bowman@cc.gatech.edu; Wed, 20 May 1998 19:07:06 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199805202307.TAA15019@snark.cs.brown.edu> Subject: Re: "flying" in VEs In-Reply-To: <199805201452.KAA28939@lennon.cc.gatech.edu> from Doug Bowman at "May 20, 98 10:52:17 am" To: bowman@cc.gatech.edu (Doug Bowman) Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 19:07:06 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL37 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Hi. Sorry about not contibuting. I have been very busy working on CAVE stuff. One of the interesting points about the "flying" is that when birds do it, they are horizontal. Flying while standing just doesn't seem to cut it. I think that if you are really going for a realistic experience, the user should be laying down or straped into some harness. It may sound crazy, but I think it might work better. Doug, I am in the process of reading your proposal. I should have it read in a few days. I plan to give you some useful feedback. (I hope ;)) As I have been reading the emails, I keep coming to the conclusion that a taxonomy for "magical" interaction should be developed. An application could be developed called "The Magic Room" that could be used as a testbed for these techniques. Matt, any news on the bib list. I really think that this can be the beginning of a survey paper. The hard part, as I am finding with my own survey on hand gesture recog, is organization of the information in a novel way. By the way, I downloaded Matt, Mark, and Ken's doctoral dissertations. I will be reading them in the next couple of months. Just to let you guys know that people besides your committees actually read these documents :) Joe > Hi folks, > > It's been awfully quiet lately... > > In thinking about travel metaphors for VEs, we often talk about > "flying" (3d travel) versus "walking" (travel contrained to 2D, > or travel along a surface). But the flying metaphor is not > really very much like real flying. You move along at a constant > rate of speed usually, with no effects of gravity, and can > even stop in midair. > > These qualities are good for many applications because they make > the motion easier to control and less cognitively challenging. This > is what you want if your goal is only to get the viewpoint to a > certain location. > > However, one of the great selling points of VEs, as Jeff and others > have mentioned, is all the magic we can do in them. We can let > the user be whatever she wants to be, or do whatever she wants to > do (new personae and abilities). The other day, my wife was wishing > that she could be a bird, and experience the magic of free flight. > Why not, I thought, implement such a technique in VEs? > > I haven't thought of all the details yet, but I can easily imagine > such a technique that used a head tracker to generate the images, > and two hand trackers with which the user could control the flight. > The user would spread his arms out like wings. A flapping motion > could give you lift, the 'wings' could be pulled back to reduce > drag, tilting the wingtips would change your pitch, changing the > wing plane would change your roll and allow you to turn.... > > Has anyone seen anything like this implemented before? Or heard > it proposed? Or thought of it themselves? I'd like to try to > create an implementation 'in my spare time' :) but don't want to > duplicate work. What do you think of this idea? I think it could > be a very compelling experience if done correctly. > > Doug (trying desperately to increase list traffic) > -- > Doug Bowman, Ph.D. Candidate > College of Computing, GVU Center, Georgia Tech > Room 388 CRB, (404) 894-5104 > bowman@cc.gatech.edu > http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Phd/Doug.Bowman/