Re: Virtual Cinema and the Web

Al Razutis (razutis@xxxx)
Mon, 2 Feb 1998 13:36:04 -0800
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Ben Myers wrote:

> I think you have missed the point that Phil is making about spatial
> perception and gone on to praise technology that is still no more than a
> toy.

There are many levels of spatial perception, and those include
'stereoscopic 3D' and interactive VR. My response was not to negate
anything Phil Solomon had offered, but to elaborate on directions being
undertaken to enlarge on the conception of media 'space' and how
film-video-digital graphics are beginning to function within these new
spaces. Perhaps it seems to be 'no more than a toy' to you, but to the
VRML consortium, hundreds of creators, present conferences (SPIE, VRML 98,
SIGGRAPH, etc.) these developments are being discussed, promoted. In the
hands of media artists it has yet to be fully 'exploited'.

I am not simply praising this 'technology', but developing works myself
(http://www.alchemists.com/uroboros/) in pursuit of a radically different
standard of motion-picture interactive 'projection systems'. I hope that
there are other people on this list that will take 'experimental cinema' to
future possibilities.

> No doubt it will become a usefull medium for artists but it is too
> artificial in its ability. I don't want you to think I'm against the
> non-film future, but todays computer enhancement will look like it was
> done on a Lite-Bright in just a few years.

Once again, this has nothing to do with 'enhancement'. In fact, the
necessary use of 'low resolution' images (jpegs), highly compressed mpegs,
8 or 16-bit sampled sound, are concessions to the limited internet
bandwidth. The VRML standard (I need not explain here) is quite different
from HTML, and its specifications are only that. What one puts into this
format is not to be judged by the initial limitations.

I suggest you take a look at something like 'Uroboros' on a data-projector
with a reasonable CPU-video card. There, as on your present monitor, you
might detect stereoscopic 3D (anaglyph) images mapped on virtual objects; you
might even see motion-picture sequences 'in space', which can be 'turned
on' and navigated 'around', you might hear sounds emanating from a
particular 'source location' in space (not just from your speakers reading
a 'sound track'). That IS a different projection 'system'.

The optical printer also seemed like a 'toy' to some, until they saw works
that changed the viewer's conception of what constituted the
'possibilities' of cinema.

xal razutis