CITYCLUSTER is a virtual-reality networking matrix, a creative high-tech container with original technological features, navigation, interactivity and graphic and content style. In which multiple environments, ambiences or cities both real and imagined, can be hosted, coexist and be interrelated within themselves through a common, virtual territory, interconnected by high-speed network, enabling remote participants to interact and collaborate in shared environments.

The framework may be expanded, modified, enriched, developed, and produced ad hoc in accordance with the nature and typology of the environment to be incorporated. Visitors, with their own creativity and communicative skills, can become protagonist and/or free citizen: navigate, interact, intervene exchange buildings, objects and ideas and or create their own ideal environment.

VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

"FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE MEGABYTE NETWORKING AGE" is the first CITYCLUSTER virtual reality networked application.

As first part of the project two Virtual Reality environments we created: Florence, the "Renaissance Age”, Chicago, representing the "Gigabits Networking Age". The virtual environments of Florence and Chicago are characterized by multiple narrative spaces that comprise animated sculptures, interactive phenomena, high-tech performances, and characters of distinct and peculiar behavior. It offers its visitors a thrilling interactive journey departing from the Renaissance until arriving and shifting to the Super Broadband Networking and Electronic Age, breaking the barrier of time and space in real time.

"FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE MEGABYTE NETWORKING AGE" is a large-scale environment. Each component of the environment covers a large virtual space, using hundreds of megabytes for models, texture-maps, and audio clips to link multiple scenes. Emphasis was given to aesthetics and content quality, to the use of visual design in the virtual environment, to the dual concept of the perspective and to the intensity of the interaction thus bringing out the content to its fullest expression.

Florence

The virtual city of Florence appears as chiaroscuro, as a golden filter brings to mind images brushed with golden, burnished, and leaded colours. Architectural structures appear luminous with golden brush strokes, seeming to radiate light from within. The Renaissance virtual environment allows a wide range of actions, space transformations, and the entwining of time and space.

Within the virtual city of Florence coexist objects and interactive creatures of peculiar behavior: Diavolis Nerboroti, Nety screens, Gigabits digital fragments, the avatars Venus, David, and Macchiavelli, as well as other selected elements and personages extracted from other outstanding works of art from the period.

Several the buildings are flexible and interactive places in which digital effects take place in accordance with the navigation and the interaction of the visitor. For example, while navigating, the visitor witnesses the buildings becoming transparent architectonic layers which will allow the frescoes, paintings, and sculptures within to become visible.

Chicago

The virtual city of Chicago appears under a unreal atmosphere, immersed within a cold, bio, gloomy and gelid environment. A faint silver watercolor with strokes of light, colors, and blurry outlines. Contrasting against this landscape, some of the most outstanding buildings of the city emerge, volumetric and realistic forms filled with intensely luminous light. Lake Michigan is an ocean of optical fibers, changing tonality and generating music as the visitor threads the water

This VR-networked piece offers an actively creative experience in the new language of interactive design through the use of new forms of interactive narrative. Emphasis was given to aesthetics, composition, balance, proportion, structure, space, light, symmetry, harmony, depth, perspective and content quality, to the use of visual design in the virtual environment, to the dual concept of the perspective and to the intensity of the interaction thus bringing out the content to its fullest expression.

AVATARS

Each virtual environment is inhabited and guided by a group of avatars: David, Venus, and Machiavelli are the Renaissance-Age avatars. Mega, Giga and Picasso are the Gigabits Networking-Age avatars. Avatars embody the visual and graphic representation of specific concepts and symbols of diverse ages.

Mega, Giga, and Picasso are virtual embodiments of the Gigabits Networking Age, a time in which the invisible is no longer formless. These avatars embody our age of meta-communication and the abstraction of representation, the generation of electronic era, high-speed power, politics, networking, tele-presence, cloning, fear, and networking.

The visitors contact and interact with each other from a remote or local site through the avatars. Each avatar represents a real person in a cyberspace system, acting as a "virtual representative" able to communicate with others in a virtual-reality environment. Through the Avatars, City Cluster's net visitors see and experience the projection of themselves into a virtual body, or alter-presence, within the virtual environment which in turn transports them to live emotionally in another state and brings their body to interrelate, interact, and become immersed within this alter-physical reality. The visitors see the virtual world through the eyes of their avatar. Each avatar acts as a virtual ego, allowing net visitors to enter the city and to extend their motion into visible form.

NAVIGATION AND INTERACTIVITY

The navigation and interaction of City Cluster are often surprising. The interactive visitor can find himself within a sort of limbo state where reality, the oniric and the imaginary exist simultaneously. The surprise factor in relation to body space and to the absence of temporal schemes is considered a pivotal experience between the remote visitors of the virtual-reality.
The navigation and interaction of City Cluster are often surprising. The interactive visitor can find himself within a sort of limbo state where reality, the oniric and the imaginary exist simultaneously. The surprise factor in relation to body space and to the absence of temporal schemes is considered a pivotal experience between the remote visitors of the virtual-reality.

Legendary buildings can become cyber gateways teleporting the visitors from one city to the other. Renaissance or Megabyte digital interactive fragments are found strewn across the VR cities or floating randomly through the atmosphere... when the visitor interacts with them the environment undergoes transformations. Masterpieces' details that turn into three-dimensional creatures … or the city itself becoming a painting, transparent and penetrable, hosting a myriad of ethereal elements. Depending on the level and the visitor interaction the shoreline of Lake Michigan can become a dense accumulation of optic fibers of diverse colors, intensity, and luminosity, and will generate musical sounds and other audio effects.

The City Cluster virtual environments of Florence and Chicago are characterised by multiple narrative spaces that comprise animated sculptures, interactive phenomena, high-tech performances, and characters of distinct and peculiar behaviour. There does not necessarily exist the lineal sequences. The centre becomes fragmented, reason for which, each one of the parts, is part of the centre... the sequences are not necessarily connected to a unique pathway but; the scenes can be united to a unique body. The virtual application is articulated by approximately twelve scene: Florence, Machiavelli &florence_planes scene, Venus, David, the Academy, Picasso, Catedral of Santa Maria del Fiore scene, The Baptistery, Giotto´s Bell Tower, Lorenzo the Magnificent gallery, Chicago city, Hancock skyscraper, Sears skyscraper, Chicago 'planes' , Chicago bridges.

Exchanging Buildings From City to City

One of the most intense interactive experiences that the visitor can have is to exchange objects and buildings from one city to the other in real time over the Net. The Dome of Florence, for example, can be transported to Chicago or the Sears Tower to Florence and so forth... Buildings may be moved to recreate a new city comprising elements and vital parts of Chicago and Florence. Ygdrasil, the software utilized for developing the project, has been upgraded and enhanced to address these feature.. Each animated environment of City Cluster is linked to all the others so that together they form a united yet open interactive narrative structure. This creative approach allows for multiple viewpoints and repeatedly generates an original multi-linear participatory interactive experience for the visitor.

META-NET-PAGE

A virtual-reality networking interface display, a VR-pathfinder called Meta-Net-Page was designed and implemented ad hoc for City Cluster. This "view panel" will serve as the main interactivity tool for the user. Is a virtual pathfinder, able to detect information, images and details that are invisible zones or intangible realities for the naked eye.
It indicates the current user coordinates and provides more detailed information about the objects within its view. It will allow the user to zoom in or out by moving the panel closer or farther away from their own eye. Is also a collaborative networking camera. It permits two remote visitors to determine simultaneously in real time the direction they want to go. Visitors from the different sites see, manipulate, and interact through the same virtual interface. In addition the visitor can "take pictures" and storage them. The user will be able to take a limited number of "snapshots". These snapshots will serve as a placeholder for a specific location and heading. When desired, the two users can collaborate to return to this perspective by moving one view panel over another.

Through Meta-Net-Page the user will be able to fly up into the sky to gain a greater overview of the city they are currently exploring, to "teleport" immediately to the location shown on the view panel.

With Meta Net Page Moreover, the Meta-Net-Page will allow the user to "grab" onto a building shown within the panel and move it to another location or even to another city. Finally, the user will be able to place a select number of textures within view of the panel and capture the texture for later application to another building. Meta-Net-Page also acts as a sort of mirror.

Platforms - Networking & Interactivity

The VR application is primarily designed to run in the CAVETM ("Cave Automatic Virtual Environment") developed at EVL, (Electronic Visualization Lab) at the University of Illinois at Chicago and on the AGAVETM display system (Access Grid Augmented Virtual Environment). The VR application can run either locally or through remote networking. In both in on SGI's Linux platform.

The VR application can run either locally or through remote networking. The networked exhibit takes place in real time between two diverse remote sites using virtual-reality networking platforms such us the CAVE™ and the AGAVE™ Display System.

Both platforms interconnect and run over high-speed networks, enabling local and remote the visitors to navigate, interact, and communicate with each other through the avatars as well as with three-dimensional models over distance in real time, in a common virtual space. Passive and active stereoscopic glasses allow them to see in 3 dimensions. A simple tracked input device, "the wand," containing a joystick and 3 buttons, allows the visitor to navigate through the VR space, manipulate virtual objects and to interact with one another.

TECHNOLOGY

Technical innovation - Several characteristics of this application presented diverse creative technical challenges, which in turn revealed innovative aspects and salient feature relative to content management, the development of juxtaposed virtual environments, networking interactive techniques, avatar design, architecture, and virtual effects. Attention was also focused on software improvement relative to project content. A series of special features and enhancements have been added to the software to satisfy content and quality levels of interactivity. The implementation of City Cluster has given rise to a range of
technological challenges. Ygdrasil, the software utilized for developing the project, has been upgraded and enhanced to address these issues.

Implementation and future development

The system has been designed to produce an integrated computing facility and to implement a creative high-tech container in which multiple environments may coexist and be interconnected within a common, virtual territory.City Cluster can be adapted to a number of diverse cities or virtual environments. The cities and habitats of City Cluster are interconnected and used as a single unified computing resource. Local and non-local interactive visitors can experience a shared environment in local and in remote locations through networking. City Cluster virtual habitats may be real or imagined, contemporary or antique.

City Cluster is also a container and a creative tool for production useful for authors and producers and for the fruition of public local and or networked. Which can be used as innovative flexible tool of communication, information exchange, analysis, production and exchange and use knowledge. As well as working instrument suitable for creative, producers, research and interdisciplinary team.