Virtual Worlds: First International Conference, Vw '98, Paris, France, July 1-3, 1998: Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

1 Introduction Imagine a virtual world with digital creatures that looks like real life, sounds like real life, and even feels like real life. Imagine a virtual world not only with nice three dimensional graphics and animations, but also with realistic physical laws and forces. This virtual world could be familiar, reproducing some parts of our reality, or unfa miliar, with strange “physical” laws and artificial life forms. As a researcher interested in the sciences of complexity, the idea of a conference about virtual worlds emerged from frustration. In the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in the design of artificial environments using image synthesis and virtual reality. The emergence of industry standards such as VRML [1] is an illustra tion of this growing interest. At the same time, the field of Artificial Life has ad dressed and modeled complex phenomena such as self organization, reproduction, development, and evolution of artificial life like systems [2]. One of the most popular works in this field has been Tierra designed by Tom Ray: an environment producing synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the “energy” resource and memory is the “material” resource [3]. Memory is or ganized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self replication. Muta tion generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different creatures compete for CPU time and memory space. Real Face Communication in a Virtual World....Pages 1-13 Animated Impostors for Real-Time Display of Numerous Virtual Humans....Pages 14-28 Can We Define Virtual Reality? The M R IC Model....Pages 29-41 Distortion in Distributed Virtual Environments....Pages 42-48 VRML Based Behaviour Database Editor....Pages 49-62 The Scan&Track Virtual Environment....Pages 63-80 CyberGlass: Vision-Based VRML2 Navigator....Pages 81-87 Work Task Analysis and Selection of Interaction Devices in Virtual Environments....Pages 88-96 Effect of Stereoscopic Viewing on Human Tracking Performance in Dynamic Virtual Environments....Pages 97-106 Interactive Movie: A Virtual World with Narratives....Pages 107-116 Real-Image-Based Virtual Studio....Pages 117-122 Pop-Out Videos....Pages 123-128 Color Segmentation and Color Correction Using Lighting and White Balance Shifts....Pages 129-142 Designing Emergence in Animated Artificial Life Worlds....Pages 143-155 ALife Meets Web: Lessons Learned....Pages 156-167 Information Flocking: Data Visualisation in Virtual Worlds Using Emergent Behaviours....Pages 168-176 Nerve Garden: A Public Terrarium in Cyberspace....Pages 177-185 A Two Dimensional Virtual World to Explain the Genetic Code Structure?....Pages 186-192 Grounding Agents in EMud Artificial Worlds....Pages 193-204 Towards Virtual Experiment Laboratories: How Multi-Agent Simulations Can Cope with Multiple Scales of Analysis and Viewpoints....Pages 205-217 A Model for the Evolution of Environments....Pages 218-228 ARéVi: A Virtual Reality Multiagent Platform....Pages 229-240 Investigating the Complex with Virtual Soccer....Pages 241-253 Webots: Symbiosis Between Virtual and Real Mobile Robots....Pages 254-263 Vision Sensors on the Webots Simulator....Pages 264-273 Grounding Virtual Worlds in Reality....Pages 274-285 Growing Virtual Communities in 3D Meeting Spaces....Pages 286-297 A Mixed 2D/3D Interface for Music Spatialization....Pages 298-307 Organizing Information in 3D....Pages 308-314 Human Centered Virtual Interactive Image World for Image Retrieval....Pages 315-322 Virtual Great Barrier Reef: A Theoretical Approach Towards an Evolving, Interactive VR Environment Using a Distributed DOME and CAVE System....Pages 323-336 The Development of an Intelligent Haulage Truck Simulator for Improving the Safety of Operation in Surface Mines....Pages 337-344 Navigation in Large VR Urban Models....Pages 345-356 Art and Virtual Worlds....Pages 357-359 Las Meninas in VR: Storytelling and the Illusion in Art....Pages 360-372 Mitologies: Medieval Labyrinth Narratives in Virtual Reality....Pages 373-383 Aggregate Worlds: Virtual Architecture Aftermath....Pages 384-393 Zeuxis vs RealityEngine: Digital Realism and Virtual Worlds....Pages 394-405 Avatars: New Fields of Implication....Pages 406-410