SIGGRAPH 1997: Ongoings

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin
• Jon Meyer
• Ken Perlin
• Ben Bederson
• Jim Hollan

Pad++, a general-purpose zoomable substrate For creating and interacting with structured information, is under development by researchers at the University of New Mexico and New York University. All Pad++ objects support zooming, and there ore mechanisms for navigating through a multiscale space using panning, zooming, and hyperlinks. Pad++ includes a number of efficiency mechanisms that help maintain interactive frame­rates with large and complicated graphical scenes.

• Janet Cohen
• Keith Frank
• Jon Ippolito

Any collaboration is a negotiation. While most artistic teams hide the filibustering, intellectual posturing, and shifting alliances that lie behind their decisions, Agree to Disagree Online brings these facets of collaboration to the fore.

• Elliott Peter Earls

Manifest destiny: In “Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures,” Jack Spicer relates the story: Yeats, 1918, a train bound for Los Angeles. His wife in a trance, automatic writing, taking dictation from “spooks.” Yeats poses the question: “What are you here for?” And the spooks reply: “We are here to give metaphors for your poetry.”

• Ronald Carraher

A history of hand-held graphics might include Tarot cards, playing cards, the carte de visite, business cards, credit cards, and more recently telephone cards. While each of these subsets has a differing history and function, they also have shared attributes that continue to attract our interest. Proportions, scale, content, cast, and techniques of production all merge with more recent communication functions. Borrowing from these physical and conceptual traditions suggests possibilities for an artist using digital typography to create a kind of permanent ephemera. Incorporating stainless steel output offers an option for the designer to employ a technology similar to computer chip technology and to investigate the conversion of digitized art to artifact.

• Yacov Sharir
• Katie Salen

The CyberHuman Dance Series is an experimental dance work exploring simulations of physical and virtual phenomena in the context of perfor­mance. By integrating innovative digital technology with the choreographic and design process, this work investigates all aspects of design and performance in cyberspace, with particular emphasis on issues of real and perceived boundaries between virtual space and real space, and the possibility of a blurred distinction between two intersecting worlds.

• Anna Cicognani

Cyberspace is language-based (cf. Cicognani, 1996, 1997; Winograd,1987), and so are virtual communities. The author argues that virtual communities are ideal places to experience and enhance a language for design, and for designers.

• Jon Berge

Life with a physical disability has allowed me a unique and humbling perspective that has manifested in my art work. I create art with and for people who live with various types of physical and/or mental limitations.

• Margaret Dolinsky
• Grit Sehmisch

The process of designing multi-user virtual environments (VE) is similar to the process of designing code or imagery, in that it is necessary to passionately maintain a catalog of ideas and references. VE design combines these passions to construct a consistent graphical user interface (GUI) with metaphors for exploration and self-reflection in a collaborative team effort.

• Reed Kram
• John Maeda

We lose the joy of pliability in our interactions with the computer when we get lost in a cacophony of visual iconic references. There is no grace. Dynamic3 emphasizes the subtleties of interaction. Not what is seen, but what is felt. A physics-based computational model and a fluid physical interface amplify the expression.

• Gregory P. Garvey

This presentation reviews three works: Genderbender, Smart Stall (exhibited in The Bridge: SIGGRAPH 96 Art Show), and The Automatic Confession Machine (exhibited in Machine Culture, SIGGRAPH 93).

• Matt Grenby

Is there a way to make a meaningful shape from a collection of the indi­vidual words of the English language? What would that shape look like? Why would this approach be preferable to a traditional representation — a printed dictionary, for example? These were among the questions we asked when we set out to visualize the English language as a single entity.

• David Small

If computers are tools for manipulating information, they have been notoriously poor at using the hands of the people who use them. By engaging the hands of the user, it is possible to get a literal handle on complex visualizations of information. In this project, the goal is to design a more practical, productive, and fluid kind of interface.

• Sandy Lowrance

izzy bombus and the story of flight is a prototype CD-ROM consisting of an animated story with associated games and educational activities for children ages four through seven. Izzy, a young bumblebee, discovers that according to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot fly. Dismayed but undeterred, izzy collects implements from a kitchen drawer to build a flying machine and asks her viewers for help with the construction. With izzy in the cockpit, the viewer pushes the launch button, the countdown begins, the smoke swirls … lift-off!

• Ergun Akleman

The talent of a caricaturist is important when using traditional media such as pencil and paper. Since traditional media are not interactive, caricatur­ists must complete the caricatures in their minds before starting to draw. Since this ability does not exist in most people, it has always been considered some sort of magical talent of a gifted few.

• M. R. Petit

A large portion of my work has entailed taking a theme or story and giving it life in a variety of media. The Mutant Gene & Tainted KoolAid Sideshow CD-ROM (completed October 1995) is a navigable interpretation of a series of performances I staged in 1994, by the same name. The performances incorporated live and pre-recorded, multiple-monitor and projected video; animation; text; both sequenced and live instrumental music; and dramatic artifacts and performance elements such as masks and dance.

• Josepha Haveman

Creative options and challenges: a digital art archive grows into a dynamic showcase with new views of the art.

• Dooley Le Cappellaine

Technophobia is a collection of original multimedia art in an interactive exhibition. In addition to the original multimedia artwork, the CD-ROM includes a studio visit with each artist.

• Johann van der Schijff

The Virtual Harvester Project is an effort to address the need For global commitment and action to fight one of human society’s most basic problems: food insecurity. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) created the Poverty Clock to illustrate how quickly poverty grows. Each successive digit on the clock indicates another person living on less than $1.00 (U.S.) per day. Synchronized to the Poverty Clock’s ticking, one new plant sprouts on the virtual corn field; yielding approximately 47 plants each minute.

• Joseph A. Insley
• Daniel J. Sandin
• Thomas A. Defanti

The VideoAvatar Library is a collection of functions that works in conjunction with the CAVE Library and can be used to add static, photo-realistic, three-dimensional representations of remote users, as well as other objects or agents, to virtual reality applications. The process involves obtaining views from 360 degrees around the person, then selecting two of these images, one for each eye, to represent the user in 3D space.