JEAN-MARC GAUTHIER: Thank you. Thank you. Thank for you for the invitation and for this great conference. So I?m the architect in the room. [LAUGHTER; APPLAUSE] Here we go. I would like to present you a few projects, actually two projects which have to do with virtual spaces and some kind of immersion experience on the desktop and also on the web. So this is really about virtual spaces and about building some kind of storytelling using the Internet and using the desktop and the computer that most of the people have at home. So those projects are really taking into consideration the premise of bandwidth and the premise also of power of most of the people. This project is an example which is developed in ninety-seven and it was developed for the Museum of Native Americans, downtown in Manhattan. And this museum was looking for some kind of an interface that would bring some different storytellers together who were Native Americans and who would tell stories about different animals from the Native Americans culture. So this was like a support for oral tradition. And of course they didn?t want, at all, virtual environment.
They wanted just a nice web interface and the idea of using VR in there was a very big temptation because we wanted to be able to stream through the scene, all kind of sounds and also all kinds of animation that would be always ready to react. Which is something of course you don?t get with QuickTime Movie. At least at that time, QuickTime Movie had not the interactivity it has now. So although it was created for an audience that was not really especially interested in virtual environments, they really enjoyed the idea of being able to browse through this sort of matte of stories and to be able to discover the different stories associated with the different animals. This installation was called ?The Eternal Echoes.? And for example, if you go back to the Island of Elk here, you can see the different stories that are connected to elk. My frustration with this work, which was mainly a frustration in terms of an architect, the level of freedom I was giving to the user was very minimum. And especially as an architect, I?ve been really interested this morning to go follow ?The Sims? stories and the way people fill up their rooms with furniture and basically obstacles. I think it?s really something that when you build physical space that you have to deal with, which is you try to answer to people?s needs for freedom to have space. To have space to move, to dance, and at the same time, you definitely stock that space with partitions, with walls, with columns, with all kind of things which totally interfere with their own freedom. And so the balance of both is something very, very important. So I got interested in working about cameras and about viewpoints in a way that will be totally interactive, which means instead to click all the time to try to go to one viewpoint or the other. I wanted a system for the web that would run on desktop and that at the same time, would provide the greatest degree of freedom around the characters. So I called that ?virtual Steadicam? because I was interested to look at some experience which you find movies where actually the camera is rigged on the actor. And whether it?s an actor or sometimes it?s a cameraman who is just walking through a space recording what?s in front of him or her. Or the opposite, the camera like in this sketch here, can be rigged on the actor and the actor moving with the background moving around at the same time. So I wanted to create that experience for the web. I wanted it to be fully interactive through any kind of web browser. I wanted to also begin to think about language that would be inspired from cinematography and video and I wanted those cameras to be customized and exchanged like little containers of behaviors that people could exchange together on the Internet. The first project where I could kind of apply this idea was a commission for a friend who wanted to look at a cockroach while it was moving around. And he wanted to look at this cockroach in a very kind of interactive way, which means to be able to hang a camera on the belly of the cockroach or on the head of the cockroach and just totally move around as this cockroach was displayed on the Internet. So the result of that little exercise is this cockroach here, which I tried to create with this camera that would let the user go around and that would, at the same time, send some information to the cockroach. I will try to get the cockroach to come right in front of you. So this first little project actually was very interesting because it helped to create the idea of a camera that could be used for any character which is in a 3-D world and which is going to be broadcast on the Internet. The camera was designed as a little container that could be just dragged and dropped on the character inside of the environment. And this character then would take that behavior and basically the character would have a camera attached to it. And I could see what the character was looking at, or I could turn around the character. This was really interesting because actually I was trying, when I was helping that friend, to find which kind of software would have that. And I looked into the aerospace industry and also some of the nuclear industry tools that were used for visualization. It looked here in nuclear plants it?s really kind of dirty inside so people like to build simulations. And they developed some interesting cameras. So I tried to basically transfer that knowledge into what could be entertainment. You can see here in the interface, which was developed by Virtools, which is a French company, you can see how the camera appears with its target, which is kind of not exactly on the character, but next to the character. And this camera moves as the character walks through the scene. Actually the character right now is just going from one sidewalk to another one, crossing the street and trying to avoid a car. Those demos are online if you want to try them. At the bottom you can see that where the behaviors are, those little containers, and the way they can be created as really pieces of language, rather than pieces of code. So this is totally for 3-D artists who are non-programmers. This is a top view showing the camera on the top. The character is moving on a path and also you can see the rectangles, which show the different heights so the character can jump down the curb and basically the character is turning around. If you look at the demo, he?s going from one sidewalk to the other, of course going down the curb to the pavement and trying to avoid a car. I wanted to get into more cinematographic approaches. One of those approaches is what we call in France, contrechamp, which is, I guess, kind of camera cuts between different angles. And it?s this very subjective camera, which is like the over the shoulder camera, which can tell you what the character is experiencing without being really the character yourself. But at the same time, you can be really psychologically more involved into the scene. I wanted to have this interactivity, this level of interactivity that lets me switch points of view. Of course these are things that exist already in some product, but I really wanted to bring that, weave that set of tools into something that would be on the web. And a lot of those ideas came actually from playing with fourth-graders in some high schools where I was trying to build with them some Lego Mind Storms Project. And I was very surprised by the inventivity at connecting little pieces of behaviors with those little strings like you do in Lego Mind Storms. And then you would send that piece of code, modular code, into the programmable brick, and the RCX brick would actually drive the little robot. So this kind of approach came really in conjunction with those experiments. This is a result in a scene. This is a scene actually developed by Virtools and one of the characters, which I created, is visiting the scene from somebody else. Another kind of camera that I thought was interesting in a discussion about movies is the way you can have transitional cameras that go from one point of view to the other. It?s a little bit like instead of having editing in a movie between two cuts, two shots, you would have a third camera that is able to blend from one shot to the other. And that?s the level of kind of a discussion that is also available in 3D Games, which is not available in movies yet. This is another story, which is online. And it?s a story of a swimmer. This is the story of Miss Potreros, who is on a boat, which is an exploration boat going to try to visit a sunken ship. And this swimmer actually achieved this sort of ideal camera I was dreaming about because scenes the swimmer is in the water, she is diving and you can dive with the swimmer under the water and have this total multiple levels of freedom. You can feel like you swim with the swimmer, as you can feel like you are just the observer watching the scene being played. You can see at the bottom of the screen, the little scene with the boat, the sunken boat, which is laying down at the bottom of the sea. This swimmer also has particle animation, which simulates the breathing in the water. These are different views of the same swimmer just by pressing on the keyboard and changing angles. This is another part of the process also that shares that how actually you can associate using those modules, a very, very strong number, I mean a high number of animations that you can trigger from the keyboard. On the right you can see those modules that allow you to do that, which are dragged and dropped on the character. This is an important phase of some of the work, which is testing, user testing and kind of videotaping the output and people?s response to it. And you?re welcome to visit Miss Potreros on tinkering dot net. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]