With Virtual Characters Leaping off Computer Screens, UCI Researcher Takes Gaming Deeper into the Real World
06.08.05 -- It sounds like science fiction: a computer character peers beyond its virtual world to see a “raft” hovering a few inches from the computer screen. The character glances about, then jumps off the monitor and rides the raft across an office or classroom before leaping off to visit another character on a different computer.
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Far from fiction, however, this is the “Virtual Raft Project” created in the laboratory of UCI computer scientist and animator Bill Tomlinson. His novel computer-technology project allows people to use a tablet PC as a handheld raft to transport animated characters between “virtual islands” on desktop computers. As Tomlinson explains, this is the first time interactive characters have been able to animate seamlessly between different computer platforms, bringing a whole new dimension to “cyber play.”
“Our main goal with this project was to create autonomous, animated characters that would engage people in an innovative way,” Tomlinson said. “Characters that are able to move seamlessly among different platforms can be more believable than those constrained to a single screen. If a character exists on only one screen, it is a subset of that screen, a piece of that machine. If, on the other hand, a character can move between screens, then it appears to exist in a broader sense.”
Tomlinson has already begun introducing the technology as a learning tool for children. With three separate computers as islands, and characters sitting around campfires of a different color on each island, children interact with the characters by helping them migrate between the islands. To do this, each child holds a raft next to the island and a character jumps on, carrying a torch aglow with its island’s fire color. The child then carries the raft across an “ocean” of real space to another island, where the character disembarks and adds its torch to the campfire. When all three colors are mixed together on each island, the fires turn white. (To view a demonstration of children playing with the Virtual Raft Project, visit www.ics.uci.edu/~wmt/movies/HomeschoolVideoQT6.mov.)
“These characters could be useful as tools for learning because they can make a connection between a virtual simulation and the real world, helping people transfer ideas from one domain to the other,” Tomlinson explained. “Also, people enjoy tangible experiences and tend to learn more effectively when they are physically engaged.”
Tomlinson envisions using this technology and additional programming to create engaging educational tools in museums and science centers. The prototype can be adapted to teach themes of ecology with animated animals and plants. He is collaborating with Lynn Carpenter, a UCI professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and an expert on restoration ecology, on an ecosystems version of the project called “EcoRaft.” They have received an $80,000 grant from the Nicholas Foundation to help fund it. The idea is to develop virtual habitat patches that are inhabited by simulated ecosystems – a tropical rainforest, for instance. Participants could use their rafts to help hummingbirds migrate among the patches, drop seeds and pollinate flowers. Through this type of interaction, users could “experience” active restoration of destroyed ecosystems, the impact of invasive species on local species, and the relationship between humans and the environment.
Tomlinson and his research group recently debuted the Virtual Raft Project for academic and computer-industry researchers at the Association for Computing Machinery 2005 Computer-Human Interaction conference in April. He then took the project to Taiwan in June for the 2005 Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Conference in Taipei and for a presentation at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu. The project also will be shown later this summer in the Emerging Technologies Program at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 conference in Los Angeles.
Tomlinson is an assistant professor of informatics and drama in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. He is also a core faculty member of the ACE (Arts Computation Engineering) program and a Calit2 faculty researcher.
Media Contacts
Lori Brandt, (949) 824-5484, lbrandt@uci.edu