Using game technology to explore the "unreality" of virtual landscapes

Scalable City - a project by Sheldon Brown and Experimental Game Lab - creates environments, from urban to rural, via a data visualization pipeline.

Now Scalable City has opened at one of my favorite museums in the whole wide world, The Exploratorium in San Francisco. As you move through the interactive exhibit, you literally "paint" the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. According to Sheldon's website, "Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process. The results of this are experiences such as prints, video installations and interactive multi-user games and virtual environments."

Here is the trailer...



In addition to exploring artistic opportunities arising from computer technology, Sheldon is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) where he is a Professor of Visual Arts and the head of New Media Arts for the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technologies (Cal-(IT)2).

Many thanks to Tezcatlipoca Bisiani for bringing this to my attention.

Virtual lessons in virtual dance choreography - A historical first

Mixed reality history was made late last week when DanCoyote Antonelli (aka DC Spensley) held the first Real Life "SkyDancer Seminar" for University of Calfornia San Diego (UCSD) undergraduate students. At the invitation of Ars Virtua curator Rubaiyat Shatner who is also Virtual Environments instructor at UCSD, DanCoyote trained over a dozen students to fly in a basic choreographic pattern inside the first ZeroG SkyDancer stage that had its debut two years ago.


The current ZeroG SkyDancers stage

Rubaiyat teaches the class virtually from San Jose, California. The class is in San Diego, California and DanCoyote is in San Francisco, California. Assisting DanCoyote were assistant director Anhinga Chaika and training director Buffy Beale. The students were skeptical at first about this new art form but soon gained a healthy respect for the challenges SkyDancers face at every performance.



That original SkyDancer stage - in addition to a significant collection of DC Spensley/DanCoyote's Second Life art work - are on display at an exibit curated by Michael Van Horn at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, as a result of the museum's sponsorship of a virtual arts exhibition at Seattle's Bumbershoots Festival 2006 where a ZeroG SkyDancers performance was projected to a huge crowd of Real Life audience members.


The first ZeroG Skydancers stage

Photography courtesy of DanCoyote Antonelli