Intelligent virtual worlds continue to develop

We've always imagined that the computer could become a fantastic tool for building real-time virtual worlds. Early examples were compelling until we realized that, no matter how many polygons and tex tu res were included, there needed to be more to it than just endlessly navigating around a static 3D space at 30fps. Next step? Add in AI,Artificial Life,Avatars. The vision of combining these capabilit/es in various permutations to create evolving, in teract ive, computer-generated v i r tua l worlds and populating them is slowly coming into focus. Invested with new dimensions of symbolism and meaning as these wor lds begin to extend the i r presence throughout our digital network, they're gradually approaching the kind of fantastic animated cybernetic systems described by science fiction wr i ter Orson Scott Card in his Ender Wiggins Series: " intel l igent" virtual worlds that respond to the user and persist through a lifetime, A critical challenge in the elaboration of these intelligent virtual worlds wil l be the development of environments that are as unpredictable and rich in interconnected processes as an actual location. And, in addition, their virtual inhabitants will need to be smart enough to learn about the user and to evolve accordingly. As always, these developments have been pioneered through the disparate efforts of many, including Karl Sims, Pattie t4aes, Joe Bates' Woggtes World, Naoko Tosa's Neurobaby, and of course, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau's interactive environments (to name just a few). In this column, we take a glimpse at three unique intelligent virtual worlds. We're not trying to present a comprehensive "past, present and future" of the area but rather than focusing on a single project, we want to present a broad range of developments.We want to give some sense of the diversity, richness and exciting possibilities offered by interactive artificial worlds. First we present Menagerie, a project from Telepresence Research that was an early effort to develop an interactive virtual world that responded to the user's activities in real time. Originally commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1992, Menagerie was also the first immersive virtual environment experience to be exhibited in a major public art museum. Secondly, we present Rebecca Allen's virtual environment framework, Emergence. This system generates an active, responsive, networked virtual world that provides the basis for an artistic installation piece entitled The Bush Soul, to be shown as part of the SIGGRAPH 98 Interact ive A r t i Emerging Technologies exhibition. Gravity is a 2S-person San Francisco based software company with roots in virtual reality that develops breakthrough 3D technology and applications.Their Terra software offers the user a beautiful, organic, dreamlike world to explore. In our final section, Zak Zaidrnan one of Grevicy's founders presents this fascinating new project. For additional perspectives on these exciting new developments, the 13th Biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence is sponsoring a special Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Environments in Brighton, U.K., this summer. For more information, see h t t p : l l w w w . s a l f o r d. a c. u k l i t i l r s a l eca i i ve . h tml . And finally, we are always looking for interesting projects and ideas to present in future columns. If you are involved in an interesting real-rime interactive project chat you think might be suitable for our column, please contact one (or both) of us.