For the 25-year anniversary of the conference the SIGGRAPH committee gave out champagne, cake and hundreds of colourful balloons for the more than 32 000 attendees from all over the world. Besides this reception and a celebration party the organizers had come up with quite a few ideas for an appropriate celebration in Orlando from July 19 until July 24. This included for example the digital camp fire and the interactive dance club and of course the usual wide selection of tutorials, seminars, discussions, exhibits et cetera.
At the digital camp fire computer pioneers appeared as story tellers to explain to the younger generation what life was like without 24-bit displays. The interactive dance club provided relaxation without the rhythm from a juke box or the music of a live band. With their movements dancers influenced the predefined sounds and visual effects. Together with realtime systems, infrared sensors, video cameras and motion sensitive floor pads they delivered a unique performance every evening.
This playful contact represents the change that has taken place in the area of computer graphics during a quarter of a century. At the first SIGGRAPH events back in the 70's only a few specialists met for an academic exchange of ideas. In the 80's the conference already experienced a significantly higher interest. Since then between twenty and thirty thousand visitors have attended every year to gather information about the newest developments and trends in computer graphics. Last year in Los Angeles SIGGRAPH culminated with more than 48 000 attendees. One reason for this was certainly the vicinity to the film studios. Meanwhile computer animations are a firm part of the movie industry; box office hits like Titanic or several commercials come to mind.
Children growing up today see computers as something quite ordinary. The SigKIDs initiative that presented computer graphics applications from kids and for kids underlined this development. One part of that was the InterSpace Station, a connected client/server environment from NTT Soft (www.ntts.com) that informs students and teachers about the life on board of a space station which is going be transported into orbit in the year 2003. During a live connection students of a Californian school had the chance to meet and interact with people at the convention center in Orlando via the Web in a virtual 3D space. (See pic. 1)
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Reality instead of futuristic vision: students interact worldwide in virtual space. |
Besides the demonstrated online communities and education across spatial boundaries NTT Soft, a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, sees the general area of operation for their Web software in online games, scientific visualization and e-commerce. The company uses two libraries for the communication between the clients and the server cluster. The data syntax library (DSL) packs data structures into a byte stream that is reduced to a few packets by the packet library (IPL) and then forwarded via TCP or the UDP-based Digital Video Transport Protocol version 2 (DVTP2). Movement and interaction of the users happen on the client side per mouse-click. Depending on the direction in which the user moves the cursor determines the path taken by his avatar - an audio/video representation of the person.
That such a multiuser system has already been implemented on a larger scale was demonstrated by Muse Technologies, Albuquerque, (www.musetech.com) in cooperation with NASA. During a press conference NASA employees in Orlando and designers at the Langley Space Center worked together in realtime with the help of the computer system. Among other things they showed how to create different perspectives with reference frames, for example shifting the viewing angle from the inside of a space station to the earth's orbit. Like any other activity this change is copied by all users. NASA intends to use this system based on Muse Continuum for maintenance and analysis purposes. This makes it for example possible to bring in specialists that are not present physically to deal with any problems. Another option would be to retrace a recorded scene and try to find out where potential anomalies might have occurred considering the collected data.
Muse calls their latest project "multi-sensory human-computer interface". With Muse Office they plan to begin the era of "perceptual computing". Working in a virtual environment should be possible without heavy helmets, data gloves or other irritating aids, so a user would be able to take a phone call while he is immersed in a virtual environment. Interaction takes place among other things with voice recognition, mapping of audio data, headtracking and pointing devices like joysticks with several degrees of freedom. The office software is designed as a modular extendable system.
VR is supposed to extend the real world as 'augmented reality'. The attempt to achieve a seamless transition between both spheres was also the topic of several research projects that were introduced as part of so-called sketches. The work revolves around interfaces invisible to the user that utilize natural human communication skills. Besides speech and motion (motion tracking) passing on emotions is also part of the project. In future computers should be able to judge the emotional state of a user by analyzing his gestures and facial expression and react adequately. Who knows, maybe we do not need to wait until 2001 before the supercomputer HAL will be present in every kitchen. But the problems that need to be overcome before that include reconciling the coordinate systems of real and virtual world for example.
"Ubiquitous computing" is what is strived for, meaning working with the computer in all aspects of life. May it be with the help of 'wearable' computers, for example in form of contact lenses or implanted (embedded) chips: the futuristic visions do not leave out anything. What seems like Science Fiction today might be part of daily life in a few years. Especially since the entertainment and games industry took an interest in virtual reality. In the just recently opened Disney Quest masses of children and adults romp about virtual worlds from morning to midnight every day.
Important components for a 'natural' handling of computers are haptic input devices that detect the material attributes of the virtual objects. A possible resistance capability has to be believable in this case, meaning that it must resemble the experiences that the user has made with the real equivalent, for example the impenetrability of a wall. Haptic stimulants also include vibration, temperature and electrical currents. Haptic rendering can be done analogous to graphical rendering. Objects are mapped to a haptic scene graph that has nodes representing a form, a dynamic behavior, a physical force, transformations and a user interface. Mouse and joystick as well as thermal gloves are already available. The SIGGRAPH department "Enhanced Realities" showed slippers that vibrate if they step on a digital cockroach.
Virtual Technologies (www.virtex.com) introduced a feedback system for the hand. With five triggers that are fastened to the fingers CyberGrasp conveys a realistic impression of the resistance and firmness of virtual objects. Especially for CAD designer and animators the Canadian company Haptic (www.haptech.com) demonstrated PenCAT/Pro, a pen with force feedback. The input device will be available in the second quarter 1999 for 689 US-$ and enables the user to feel lines, edges and textures of the objects they design.
The company Sensable (www.sensable.com) wants to transfer the artistic characteristics and style of a brush to the digital world. The input device translates finest changes of pressure and hand movement to the software.
Holographic surfaces where a user can manipulate objects with his hands are in the trial phase. The shift can for example take place in relation to two control points on a Bezier curve (www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/holowall/). A semi-transparent surface makes sure that the HoloWall can differentiate hand movements from the background. For oher "gesture-based" systems this usually proves difficult.
The exhibition for art and "touchware" as well as the department "enhanced realities" showed several examples for natural user interfaces. Among other things attendees were able to test what it is like to not only play table-tennis against another human being, but additionally against the table acting as "Packman". For a Japanese puzzle game the heads of the players were recorded on video in realtime to be used as puzzle piece that were changing constantly. The French CAVE installation was less cheerful, since visitors were walking through a three-dimensional landscape with tanks, ruins and injured people. Visitors could take pictures like a tourist with one difference to the real world, however: the photographed segment vanished as a part of the "reality". Only a white spot remained instead as a symbol that everybody changes the environment with his actions.
Soy sauce was the base for the haptic interface of the "Stream of Consciousness" by MIT Media Lab's Aesthetics and Computation Group (acg.media.mit.edu/projects/stream/). Visitors of the interactive Zen garden could use their hands to stop and manipulate the stream of words that a camera projected into flowing water. By applying pressure to the touchpad the user pushes away the soy sauce, the interface becomes translucent, the camera and light source attached below record the hand movements and direct an overhead projector accordingly. (see pic. 2)
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User interface with soy sauce. Foto: Webb Chappell |
The implementation of VR in medicine has been tested for years already, for example for treating phobias. Newer experiments investigate how this technology could be used for decreasing pain. According to first results VR applications are well suited for distracting patients who need to endure a painful treatment and thus support the therapy. In a group of 10 to 14 year old burn victims the physical therapy achieved an up to 20 percent higher range of motion than in a control group, where a Nintendo game was used for distraction.
Such experiments, CAVE installations, immersive workbenches or Disney's VR adventures need high-performance computers in the background - today these are mainly SGI workstations. However, there are supposedly CAVE installations based on Intergraph's NT machines already. And Muse also introduced a NT version of its Continuum software that was previously only available for Unix computers. IBM propagated its Intellistation and gave several partners the opportunity to show graphics software for NT as sub-exhibitors. Silicon Graphics did not show the announced Visual PC after all. "Probably at the end of the year", was the rather vague statement.
This year a total of 327 companies exhibited at SIGGRAPH. Additional news in iX 09/98.
Everybody agreed that the way people interact with computers will significantly change in the next few years. The predictions see VR coming out of its niche existence and becoming the norm. Keynote speaker Jim Blinn made the prognosis that it will not be possible to distinguish synthetic from real actors in a few years. He got people laughing when he speculated that SIGGRAPH will completely take place in virtual space in 2003.
But this is not the case quite yet. The next conference will be held in the conference center in Los Angeles from August 8 to 13.
Translated by Sabine Cianciolo
Dieser Text ist der Zeitschriften-Ausgabe 09/1998 von iX entnommen.
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