Simon Birrel and
Alejandro Sacristán
versión en español
Simon Birrel and
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Early Bird Sessions:
To those outside the fields of Virtual Reality and the Internet, it may seem impossible to do work of interest due to the high cost of equipment and personnel necessary. This presentation will show how work such as Pandora has been developed, and will take examples from older projects to show how advanced equipment and graphics may actually be misleading the way Cyberspace is being developed.
To begin with, Alejandro Sacristán of Madrid-based Realidad Virtual will recount the genesis of the Pandora project early last year. Pandora is a 3D chat space along the lines of World Chat that was developed wholly in Spain, and placed on-line in the Internet last year.
Then, Simon Birrell, the project's programmer, will give a preview of a new incarnation of Pandora, developed by 3D/Net for Tandem Computers. The client, server and complete source codes will be given free to the Internet, in order to encourage new debate and projects in this sphere.
The most obviously visible part of Cyberspace, and of projects such as Pandora, are the 3D graphics. They are also the part that most strain the client computer's resources, and have led to ever-increasing demands on the PC owner's hardware in order to play with even simple VRML worlds. But are 3D graphics the fundamental technology that we should be developing in order to build Cyberspace? Or are we missing the point about what virtual worlds are, and how they should be represented.
Taking as point of departure we will demonstrate a seminal, non-3D computer game developed four years ago, and show how many of the aspects of advanced cyberspace technology already exist on very modest hardware. Simulation, intelligent agents, high-level knowledge-based representation, and multi-user consistency, all of which are as least if not more important than 3D graphics, can and have been achieved through a combination of minimal resources, imagination, talent and hard work.
We will propose, that while the interesting work in graphics proceeds, that more effort is expended on the abstract forms of representation that will be the infrastructure of any proposed cyberspace beyond the "toy" level of complexity. We will show that by forgetting, for the moment, the glitz and the glamour of 3D graphics, that there is much exciting work still to be done, and that it doesn't take a major studio's budget to contribute to it.
Biographies: |
Simon Birrell's fate was sealed at the age of 18 when his parents bought him a home computer. After a string of now-forgotten computer games, he took over the reins of development at legendary games house Palace Software. There he worked on a number of still ground-breaking games, such as Chris Stangroom's "Jekyll & Hyde", that contain AI and cyberspace technology. He then relocated to Madrid, and spent three years at Realidad Virtual, developing VR software and lecturing. He is now technical director of 3D/Net, a start-up cyberspace studio.
Alejandro Sacristán has always been involved in the emergence of new cultural, technological and artistic tendencies. He has promoted, initiated and developed such tendencies. In the 80s he participated in Spain's first techno music group "El Aviador Dro", he co-founded the most influential independent record label for Spanish Pop music and a pioneer videogame company named DRO-SOFT. In the 90s he created the consulting firm "Los Constructores del Futuro" and the first spanish virtual reality company, "Realidad Virtual Asociados" with José Antonio Mayo. Currently he is director of this company, consultant to Art Futura, and writes for scientific journals. |