LOS ANGELES -- Welcome to Siggraph's Millennium Motel, where conference attendees experience mind-bending examples of where emerging technologies are taking art, entertainment, games, and society.
Step into the exhibition and bump into a '64 Bel Air ready to cruise on Route 66.6. Get in, release the parking brake, and zip onto a virtual 3-D road in a surreal desert created on Intergraph workstations, digitally projected onto a giant screen.
The steering wheel, headlights, and gas pedal are actually MIDI interfaces linked to Houdini's 3-D animation software. Want different scenery? Just push a new radio button.
At the other end of the hall, Cal Tech's Steven Schkolne demonstrates a new art form he calls surface drawing. By donning 3-D goggles and a motion-sensitive glove, you can "paint" three-dimensional structures in the air, eliminating both the clumsy monitors that require you to work in two dimensions and the modeling software that turns everything into symmetrical shapes. The structures are automatically stored on a computer.
Schkolne displays a 3-D representation of a human face he's created using the technique. With its rough strokes and grainy texture it looks like it was sculpted from clay -- and not too well, either. "I'm learning to be an artist," says the computer scientist, noting that this is the first human face he has created using the technique.
Two major entertainment companies have expressed interest, he says. Disney and DreamWorks? No comment.
He is mulling ways to create animated 3-D motion and working in four dimensions. Four dimensions? "It's still conceptual," he explains.
Nearby, UCLA professor Rebecca Allen is demonstrating "The Bush Soul," a mystical exploration of the role of humans and avatars in a world of artificial life.
Borrowing the myths of the bush people, researchers in UCLA's Emergence Project created a world where the visitor becomes a pulsing orb of spiritual energy who can enter the bodies of the alien creatures living there. The visitor uses an ordinary joystick to send his "soul" bopping around the landscape -- entering creatures at will and briefly becoming them.
Each creature has its own programmed behavior. A herd of swinging tentacles swings more rapidly when a visitor approaches and disappears entirely when you come right up to them. "They're shy," Allen explains.
Every 10 minutes, night falls and the soul ascends to the sky, then drops back to the ground, surrounded by strange artificial life forms (workers and gypsies, she says) who dance around the soul and bow in adoration.
Allen wants to redefine the way people think about interacting with virtual worlds. Generally, avatars -- characters that give computer users a graphical presence in cyberspace -- are just puppets that users can control as they please.
But in "Bush Soul," users need to learn how to adapt to a world that is unpredictable and to inhabit bodies that don't always do what they expect them to do -- much like real life.
It teaches you respect for other life forms," she says. "In their world, you're the visitor."
The Siggraph conference runs through Saturday at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Exhibitions are open through Friday.
