Intelligent virtual environments for virtual reality art

2004

Abstract We introduce a novel approach to the creation of Virtual Reality Art installations, which supports the design of alternative worlds, in which laws of Physics can be redefined to induce new user experiences. To implement this concept of" Alternative Reality", we have used Artificial Intelligence techniques to support the definition of the virtual environment behaviour, an approach inspired by Qualitative Reasoning systems.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

We describe a new approach to the behaviour of 3D environments that supports the definition of physical processes and interactive phenomena. The work takes as a starting point the traditional event-based architecture that underlies most game engines. These systems discretise the environments' Physics by separating the objects' kinematics from the physical processes corresponding to objects interactions. This property has been used to insert a new behavioural layer, which implements AI-based simulation techniques. We introduce the rationale behind AI-based simulation and the techniques we use for qualitative Physics, as well as a new approach to world behaviour based on the induction of causal impressions. This is illustrated through several examples on a test environment. This approach has implications for the definition of complex world behaviour or non-standard physics, as required in creative applications.

2004

Abstract In this paper, we describe such an environment, in which the user can be presented in real-time with an alternative range of consequences for a given interaction with virtual world objects, thus inducing various perceptions of causality. From a systemic perspective, we can adopt a pragmatic approach, inspired from human philosophy, which considers that causal relations are established by the user in response to certain event cooccurrences.

This paper reports on a Virtual Reality theater experiment named Ilétait X n fois, conducted by artists and computer scientists working in cognitive science. It offered the opportunity for knowledge and ideas exchange between these groups, highlighting the benefits of collaboration of this kind. Section 1 explains the link between enaction in cognitive science and virtual reality, and specifically the need to develop an autonomous entity which enhances presence in an artificial world. Section 2 argues that enactive artificial intelligence is able to produce such autonomy. This was demonstrated by the theatrical experiment,"Ilétait X n fois" (in English: 'Once upon Xn time'), explained in section 3. Its first public performance was in 2009, by the company Dérézo. The last section offers the view that enaction can form a common ground between the artistic and computer science areas.

In this paper, we report work in progress in the development of a novel platform for Virtual Reality Art installations. We first introduce the notion of Alternative Reality that extends traditional VR to support the more radical experiments required by artistic productions. We subsequently introduce several technical approaches through which traditional laws of physics or more fundamental laws such as causality can be redefined within a virtual environment. We use a game engine as a development environment, which supports the redefinition of low-level physical behaviours. Changing physical or causal laws however requires the development of an explicit representation of high-level behaviour. Working with causality in particular calls for the use of representations developed for instance in qualitative physics. We illustrate the work in progress with early results from small-scale examples and finally describe the target platform onto which final installations will be developed.

Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, 2007

The development of complex interactive 3D systems raises the need for representations supporting more abstract descriptions of world objects, their behaviour and the world dynamics. The inclusion of Artificial Intelligence representations and their use within 3D graphic worlds face both fundamental and technical issues due to the difference in representational logic between computer graphics and knowledge-based systems. We present a framework for such an integration illustrated by a first prototype.

2006

Abstract In entertainment applications, artificial intelligence techniques have most often been used to implement embodied agents or to automatically generate artistic content. A more recent development concerns using AI to support the user experience through new AI-based interactivity techniques. This is especially of interest for the development of artistic installations based on interactive 3D worlds.

Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia - MULTIMEDIA '04, 2004

We introduce a novel approach to the creation of Virtual Reality Art installations, which supports the design of alternative worlds, in which laws of Physics can be redefined to induce new user experiences. To implement this concept of "Alternative Reality", we have used Artificial Intelligence techniques to support the definition of the virtual environment behaviour, an approach inspired by Qualitative Reasoning systems. Besides the redefinition of physical laws, we have developed mechanisms for eliciting causal relations between events, as causality plays an important part in users' perception of virtual worlds. Our pilot installation is a CAVE TM -like system incorporating a state-of-theart computer game engine as visualisation software, which hasbeen ported to this immersive display. The event-based system underlying the game engine is used to bypass the native Physics engine and replace it with our Alternative Reality software. A first prototype has been fully implemented, the Alternative Reality modules totaling over 100,000 lines of C++ code. We present early results obtained with this approach, illustrated with examples taken from two artistic briefs, developed by digital artists associated to this research.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Causal perception is an important cognitive phenomenon, which plays a central role in our understanding of the world. As such, its study is also relevant to interactive graphics systems. In this paper, we introduce a virtual reality system which can elicit causal perception. The system operates by intercepting the consequences of subjects' actions and modifying them to generate new event co-occurrence. This process is based on an explicit representation of action structure, which supports the generation of event co-occurrences on a principled basis. We present results from a user experiment, which confirm a high level of causal perception in subjects having used the system.