From cdshaw@umbilicus.artsci.washington.edu Sat May 23 15:22:17 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 PAA19430 for ; Sat, 23 May 1998 15:22:14 -0400 (EDT) Received: from wheaten.hitl.washington.edu (QvwQA3tbhpnpbJ3IU1qlxNvpqRTVgqob@[128.95.73.60]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id PAA22851 for ; Sat, 23 May 1998 15:22:12 -0400 (EDT) Received: from umbilicus.artsci.washington.edu (umbilicus.artsci.washington.edu [128.95.248.206]) by wheaten.hitl.washington.edu (8.8.8/8.6.12) with SMTP id MAA03508 for <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>; Sat, 23 May 1998 12:22:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from cdshaw@localhost) by umbilicus.artsci.washington.edu (950413.SGI.8.6.12/8.6.10) id MAA27928 for 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu; Sat, 23 May 1998 12:22:06 -0700 From: Chris Shaw Message-Id: <199805231922.MAA27928@umbilicus.artsci.washington.edu> Subject: Re: Osmose To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Date: Sat, 23 May 1998 12:22:06 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <4FD6422BE942D111908D00805F3158DF05B2672E@red-msg-52.dns.microsoft.com> from "Matt Conway" at May 22, 98 12:26:56 pm Reply-To: cdshaw@cs.URegina.ca X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: RO Matt, > It's the visual/interactive language that we're lacking in VR. > no doubt there are implementation challenges, but those go away with > time First, I'd like to point out that the quest for a visual language for VR has been around since 1990 or before. In the Banff/U of Alberta Art & Virtual Environments Project, it was mentioned in the funding request. Film is the medium that people usually point to as a useful source of techniques, especially for scene transitions. However, as we all know, film does not work the same as VR. The fundamental difference is the 30-100ms time allotment. Another fundamental difference is interactivity. Potentially, anything is possible in a VR world. One way to sidestep the interactivity challenge is to keep the user busy with threats, and another is to put the user in a car. On the other hand, people want to be told stories, and the narrative agenda makes some tricks necessary, or at least allowable. Perhaps the desire for narrative will create a dominant style by virtue of it being what the users want. On a semi-technical point, my experience with artists working in VR is that they are extremely hungry for polygons and texels. Perhaps the current top machines can deliver the desired performance for some projects, but I doubt it. My point is that steady-state scene rendering hogs all the resources, and transitions cause a doubling in resource use. -- Chris Shaw University of Regina cdshaw@cs.URegina.ca Assistant Professor http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~cdshaw