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January 07, 2003
Experiencing Worlds
Danny's post about exploring movie sets as virtual worlds is a good idea. I'm sure that Middle Earth must now exist in painful detail as a 3D model, why not rent it out to us to wander around? (Actually, it occurs to me that game companies must already be making use of the movie's models to some degree...)
What Dan's post really reminds me of is, oddly enough, landscape painting in the 19th century. Scalable, immersive, experiential environments have been around for a while.
In particular, the work of Frederic Church. His huge paintings, like Niagara Falls, were created as "experiences". It toured the country and was shown in a dimly lit room by itself. People would pay to stand in front of them, just to be awed by the thing; the "sheer joy of being there" that Dan's describing. (A tangent here is the 19th-centrury popularity of the "Claude glass", a special colored mirror that people used to make real landscapes look more like paintings of landscapes. We're not the first to understand that techno-mediated experiences can be more interesting than the real thing.)
Even more similar is something like the Gettysburg Cyclorama, a truly massive painting of that battle, painted on a curved wall that wrapped around the audience: "A 'cyclorama' was a very popular form of entertainment in the late 1800's, both in America and Europe. These massive oil-on-canvas paintings were mounted in special auditoriums and were enhanced with landscaped foregrounds and life-size figures. The result was a scene that surrounded the viewer, giving it a three-dimensional effect, placing the spectator in the center of the action."
Of course, cycloramas and massive landscape paintings-as-experiences kind of went away as movies arrived, offering more immersive and realistic entertainment.
In a sense, most history paintings or monumental sculpture (here an example from the US Capitol's interior friezes), are meant to be experienced similarly: non-linear (oh, yes indeedy), hyperlinked (yep) visual "environments" which are organized around a narrative, but are not bound soley by that narrative. There's a main story, but down at the level of details, that story is reinforced, annotated, and built upon. Clever viewers or repeat visitors will find a lot more to explore than first meets the eye.
One more example: wall paintings in the House of the Vettii, Pompeii, which are meant to be linked thematically by wandering among them, riffing on myths and philosophy with dinner guests.
Posted by Andrew at January 7, 2003 10:19 AM
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Comments
Re: game designers using movie models, there's an interesting article up on Gamasutra called "Creating an Event-Driven Cinematic Camera" at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030108/hawkins_01.htm (login required).
Posted by: nadav at January 9, 2003 11:35 AM