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From: manovich@indy1.calarts.edu (Lev Manovich) The Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds: Report from Los Angeles West Holywood, Los Angeles, November 1995 Welcome to a Virtual World! Strap on your avatar! Don't have the programming skills or time to build your own? No problem. We provide a complete library of pre-assembled characters; one of them is bound to fit you perfectly. Join the community of like-minded users who agree that three-dimensional space is more sexy! Yes, there is nothing more liberating than flying through a 3D scene, executing risky maneuvers and going for the kill. Mountains and valleys can represent files on a network, financial investments, the enemy troops, the body of a virtual sex partner -- it does not really matter. Zoom! Roll! Pitch! Not enough visual realism? For just an extra $9.95 a month you can update your rendering speed to a blistering 490,000 polygons a second, increasing the quality of the experience a staggering 27.4%! And, for another $4.95 you will get a chance to try a new virtual world every month, including a mall, a brothel, the Sistine Chapel, Paris during the Revolution of 1789, and even the fully navigable human brain. A 3D networked virtual world is waiting for you; all we need is your credit card number. This advertisement is likely to appear on your computer screen quite soon, if it has not already. Ten years after William Gibson's fictional description of cyberspace [2] and five years after the first theoretical conferences on the subject [3], cyberspace is finally becoming a reality. More than that, it promises to become a new standard in how we interact with computers -- a new way to work, communicate and play. Virtual Worlds: History and Current Developments (If such words as SIMNET, VRML, Quicktime VR and WorldChat are familiar to you, skip to the next section.) Although a few networked multi-user graphical virtual environments were constructed already in the 1980s, they were specialized projects involving custom hardware and designed for particular groups of users. In Lucasfilm's Habitat, described by its designers as a "many-player online virtual environment," few dozen players used their home Commodore 64 computers to connect to a central computer running a simulation of a two-dimensional animated world. The players could interact with the objects in this world as well as with each other's graphical representations (avatars). [4] Conceptually similar to Habitat but much more upscale in its graphics was SIMNET (Simulation Network) developed by DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). SIMNET was probably the first working cyberspace -- the first collaborative THREE-DIMENSIONAL virtual environment. It consisted of a number of individual simulators linked by a high-speed network. Each simulator contained a copy of the same world database and the virtual representations of all the other simulators. In one of SIMNET's implementations, over two hundred M-1 tank crews, located in Germany, Washington D.C., Fort Knox, and other places around the world, were able to participate in the same virtual battle. [5] I remember attending a panel at a SIGGRAPH conference where a programmer who worked for Atari in the early 1980s argued that the military stole the idea of cyberspace from the games industry, modeling SIMNET after already existing civilian multi-participant games. With the end of the Cold War, the influences are running in the opposite way. Many companies that yesterday supplied very expensive simulators to the military are busy converting them into location-based entertainment systems (LBE). In fact, one of the first such systems which opened in Chicago in 1990 -- BattleTech Center from Virtual World Entertainment, Inc. -- was directly modeled on SIMNET. [6] Like SIMNET, BattleTech Center comprised a networked collection of futuristic cockpit models with VR gear. For $7 each, a number of players could fight each other in a simulated 3D environment. By 1995, Virtual World was operating dozens of centers around the world that, also like SIMNET, depended on proprietary software and hardware. [7] In contrast to such custom built and expensive location-based entertainment systems, the Internet provides a structure for 3D cyberspace that can simultaneously accommodate millions of users, which is inherently modifiable by them and which runs on practically every computer. A number of researchers and companies are already working to turn this possibility into reality. Most important among the attempts to spatialize the Net is VRML (The Virtual Reality Modeling Language), conceived in the spring of 1994. According to the document defining Version 1.0 (May 26, 1995), VRML is "a language for describing multi-participant interactive simulations -- virtual worlds networked via the global Internet and hyperlinked with the World Wide Web." [8] Using VRML, Internet users can construct 3D scenes hyperlinked to other scenes and to regular Web documents. In other words, 3D space becomes yet another media accessible via the Web, along with text, sounds, and moving images. But eventually a VRML universe may subsume the rest of the Web inside itself. So while currently the Web is dominated by pages of text, with other media elements (including VRML 3D scenes) linked to it, future users may experience it as one gigantic 3D world which will contain all other media, including text, inside itself. This is certainly the vision of VRML designers who aim to "create a unified conceptualization of space spanning the entire Internet, a spatial equivalent of WWW." [9] They see VRML as a natural stage in the evolution of the Net from an abstract data network toward a "'perceptualized' Internet where the data has been sensualized," [10] i.e., represented in three dimensions. VRML 1.0 makes possible the creation of networked 3D worlds but it does not allow for the interaction between their users. Another direction in building cyberspace has been to add graphics to already popular Internet systems for interaction, such as chat lines and MUDs. Worlds Inc. which advertises itself as "a publisher of shared virtual environments" [11] has created WorldChat, a 3D chat environment which has been available on the Internet since April 1995. Users first choose their avatars and then enter the virtual world (a space station) where they can interact with other avatars. The company imagines "the creation of 3-D worlds, such as sports bars, where people can come together and talk about or watch sporting events online, or shopping malls." [12] Another company, Ubique [13], created technology called Virtual Places which also allows the users to see and communicate with other users' avatars and even take tours of the Web together. [14] Currently the most ambitious full-scale 3D virtual world on the Internet is AlphaWorld, sponsored by Worlds Inc. At the time of this writing, it featured 200,000 building, trees and other objects, created by 4,000 Internet users. The world includes a bar, a store which provides prefabricated housing, and news kiosks which take you to other Web pages. [15] The movement toward spatialization of the Internet is not an accident. It is part of a larger trend in cyberculture -- spatialization of ALL representations and experiences. This trend manifests itself in a variety of ways. The designers of human-computer interfaces are moving from 2D toward 3D -- from flat desktops to rooms, cities, and other spatial constructs. [16] Web designers also often use pictures of buildings, aerial views of cities, and maps as front ends in their sites. Apple promotes Quicktime VR, a software-only system which allows the user of any personal computer to navigate a spatial environment and interact with 3D objects. Another example is the emergence of a new field of scientific visualization devoted to spatialization of data sets and their relationships with the help of computer graphics. Like the designers of human-computer interfaces, the scientists assume that spatialization of data makes working with it more efficient, regardless of what this data is. Finally, in many computer games, from the original "Zork" to the best-selling CD-ROM "Myst," narrative and time itself are equated with the movement through space (i.e., going to new rooms or levels.) In contrast to modern literature, theater, and cinema which are built around the psychological tensions between characters, these computer games return us to the ancient forms of narrative where the plot is driven by the SPATIAL movement of the main hero, traveling through distant lands to save the princess, to find the treasure, to defeat the Dragon, and so on. A similar spatialization of narrative has defined the field of computer animation throughout its history. Numerous computer animations are organized around a single, uninterrupted camera move through a complex and extensive set. A camera flies over mountain terrain, moves through a series of rooms, maneuvers past geometric shapes, zooms out into open space, and so on. In contrast to ancient myths and computer games, this journey has no goal, no purpose. It is an ultimate "road movie" where the navigation through the space is sufficient in itself. Aesthetics of Virtual Worlds The computerization of culture leads to the spatialization of all information, narrative, and even time. Unless this overall trend is to suddenly reverse, the spatialization of cyberspace is next. In the words of the scientists from Sony's The Virtual Society Project, "It is our belief that future online systems will be characterized by a high degree of interaction, support for multi-media and most importantly the ability to support shared 3D spaces. In our vision, users will not simply access textual based chat forums, but will enter into 3D worlds where they will be able to interact with the world and with other users in that world." What will be the visual aesthetics of spatialized cyberspace? What would these 3D worlds look like? In answering this question I will try to abstract the aesthetic features common to different virtual worlds already in existence: computer games; CD-ROM titles; virtual sets in Hollywood films; VR simulations; and, of course, virtual worlds on the Internet such as VRML scenes, WorldChat, and Quicktime VR movies. I will also consider the basic technologies and techniques used to construct virtual spaces: 3D computer graphics; digitized video; compositing; point and click metaphor. What follows are a few tentative propositions on the visual aesthetics of virtual worlds. 1. Realism as Commodity Digit in Latin means number. Digital media reduces everything to numbers. This basic property of digital media has a profound effect on the nature of visual realism. In a digital representation, all dimensions that affect the reality effect -- detail, tone, color, shape, movement -- are quantified. As a consequence, the reality effect produced by the representation can itself be related to a set of numbers. For a 2D image, the crucial numbers are its spatial and color resolution: the number of pixels and the number of colors per pixel. For instance, a 640 x 480 image of an object contains more detail and therefore produces a stronger reality effect than a 120 x 160 image of the same object. For a 3D model, its level of detail, and consequently the reality effect, is specified by 3D resolution: the number of points the model is composed of. Spatial, color, and 3D resolutions describe the realism of static representations: scanned photographs; painted backgrounds; renderings of 3D objects; and so on. Once the user begins to interact with a virtual world, navigating through a 3D space or inspecting the objects in it, other dimensions become crucial. One of them is temporal resolution. The more frames a computer can generate in a second, the smoother the resulting motion. Another is the speed of the system's response: if the user clicks on an image of a door to open it or asks a virtual character a question, a delay in response breaks the illusion. Yet another can be called consistency: if moving objects do not cast shadows (because the computer can't render them in real time) while the static background has them, the inconsistency affects the reality effect. All these dimensions are quantifiable. The number of colors in an image, the temporal resolution the system is capable of and so on can be specified in exact numbers. Not surprisingly, the advertisements for graphics software and hardware prominently display these numbers. Even more importantly, those in the business of visual realism -- the producers of special effects, military trainers, digital photographers, television designers -- now have definite measures for what they are buying and selling. For instance, the Federal Aviation Administration which creates the standards for simulators to be used in pilot training specifies the required realism in terms of 3D resolution. In 1991 it required that for daylight, a simulator must be able to produce a minimum of 1000 surfaces or 4000 points. [17] Similarly, a description of the Compu-Scene IV simulator from GE Aerospace states that a pilot can fly over a geographically accurate 3D terrain that includes 6000 features per square mile. [18] The numbers which characterize digital realism simultaneously reflect something else: the cost involved. More bandwidth, higher resolution, faster processing result in a stronger reality effect -- and cost more. The bottom line: the reality effect of a digital representation can now be measured in dollars. Realism has became a commodity. It can be bought and sold like anything else. This condition is likely to be explored by the designers of virtual worlds. If today users are charged for the connection time, in the future they can be charged for visual aesthetics and the quality of the overall experience: spatial resolution; number of colors; complexity of characters (both geometric and psychological); and so on. Since all these dimensions are specified in software, it becomes possible to automatically adjust the appearance of a virtual world on the fly, boosting it up if a customer is willing to pay more. In this way, the logic of pornography will be extended to the culture at large. Peep shows and sex lines charge their customers by the minute, putting a precise cost on each bit of pleasure. In virtual worlds, all dimensions of reality will be quantified and priced separately. Neal Stephenson's 1992 "Snow Crash" provides us with one possible scenario of such a future. Entering the Metaverse, the spatialized Net of the future, the hero sees "a liberal sprinkling of black- and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white." [19] He also encounters couples who can't afford custom avatars and have to buy off-the-shelf models, poorly rendered and capable of just a few standard facial expressions -- virtual world equivalents of Barbie dolls. [20] This scenario is gradually becoming a reality. A number of online stock photo services already provide their users with low resolution photographs for a small cost, charging more for higher resolution copies. A company called Viewpoint Datalabs International is selling thousands of ready-to-use 3D geometric models widely used by computer animators and designers. For most popular models you can choose between different versions, with more detailed versions costing more than less detailed ones. [21] 2. Romanticism, Adorno, and Photoshop Filters: From Creation to Selection Viewpoint Datalabs' models exemplify another characteristic of virtual worlds: they are not created from scratch but assembled from ready- made parts. Put differently, in digital culture creation has been replaced by selection. E. H. Gombrich's concept of a representational schema and Roland Barthes' "death of the author" helped to sway us from the romantic ideal of the artist creating totally from scratch, pulling images directly from his imagination. [22] As Barthes puts it, "The Text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture." [23] Yet, even though a modern artist may be only reproducing or, at best, combining in new ways preexistenting texts and idioms, the actual material process of art making supports the romantic ideal. An artist operates like God creating the Universe -- he starts with an empty canvas or a blank page. Gradually filling in the details, he brings a new world into existence. Such a process of art making, manual and painstakingly slow, was appropriate for the age of pre-industrial artisan culture. In the twentieth century, as the rest of the culture moved to mass production and automation, literally becoming "culture industry," art continued to insist on its artisan model. Only in the 1910s when some artists began to assemble collages and montages from already existing cultural "parts," was art introduced to the industrial method of production. In contrast, electronic art from its very beginning was based on a new principle: modification of an already existing signal. The first electronic instrument designed in 1920 by the legendary Russian scientist and musician Leon Theremin contained a generator producing a sine wave; the performer simply modified its frequency and amplitude. [24] In the 1960s video artists began to build video synthesizers based on the same principle. The artist was no longer a romantic genius generating a new world purely out of his imagination; he became a technician turning a knob here, pressing switch there -- an accessory to the machine. Substitute a simple sine wave by a more complex signal (sounds, rhythms, melodies); add a whole bank of signal generators and you have arrived at a modern music synthesizer, the first instrument which embodies the logic of all new media: not creation but selection. The first music synthesizers appeared in the 1950s, followed by video synthesizers in the 1960s, followed by DVE (Digital Video Effects) in the late 1970s -- the banks of effects used by video editors; followed by computer software such as 1984 MacDraw that already come with a repertoire of basic shapes. The process of art making has finally caught up with modern times. It has become synchronized with the rest of modern society where everything is assembled from ready-made parts; from objects to people's identities. The modern subject proceeds through life by selecting from numerous menus and catalogs of items -- be it assembling an outfit, decorating the apartment, choosing dishes from a restaurant menu, choosing which interest groups to join. With electronic and digital media, art making similarly entails choosing from ready-made elements: textures and icons supplied by a paint program; 3D models which come with a 3D modeling program; melodies and rhythms built into a music program. While previously the great text of culture from which the artist created his own unique "tissue of quotations" was bubbling and shimmering somewhere below the consciousness, now it has become externalized (and greatly reduced in the process) -- 2D objects, 3D models, textures, transitions, effects which are available as soon as the artist turns on the computer. The World Wide Web takes this process to the next level: it encourages the creation of texts that completely consist of pointers to other texts that are already on the Web. One does not have to add any new content; it is enough to select from what already exists. This shift from creation to selection is particularly apparent in 3D computer graphics -- the main technique for building virtual worlds. The amount of labor involved in constructing three-dimensional reality from scratch in a computer makes it hard to resist the temptation to utilize pre-assembled, standardized objects, characters, and behaviors readily provided by software manufacturers -- fractal landscapes, checkerboard floors, complete characters and so on. [25] Every program comes with libraries of ready-to-use models, effects or even complete animations. For instance, a user of the Dynamation program (a part of