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| Group Interaction |
an interactive installation by Michael Hoch and Detlev Schwabe shown at ZKM, Germany '99. this work originated from the general notion that people should experience the sense of presence in a virtual space through movements as much as through visual or acoustic impressions. As social beings people are necessarily aware of their (local) position in group situations and they experience the physical space and the social climate of a group situation by simultaneously watching and moving around. Vision tracking hardware and software technology has been applied on a situation in the Extended Virtual Environment (EVE) dome projection system where 5 persons interact with the projected imagery of a virtual deep-sea world in which schools of marine life forms roam the grounds (see figure). In our setup we implemented a simple behavioural animation system in which the group behaviour of 40 fishes emerges from a set of well-combined acceleration rules. The interface software we developed relates the movement behaviour of the 5 persons to the flock of fishes in terms of attraction, avoidance, fleeing, and following. By analysing differing numbers of people in real space and different modes of interaction between the virtual and real world, we found that it is possible to reinforce mutual awareness between human participants by having two participants in real space approaching each other. Such results, however, were difficult to reproduce when more then three people where present in real space since the underlying motion patterns get considerably complex. It is yet unclear how to map such motion patterns to such audio visual scenarios. Specially if those motion patterns are acquired in an "intelligent" way, i.e. tracking software will identify people (as opposed to mere motion tracking by difference imaging). movie: fish.mpg (27 Mb) for more info see publication: |
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