The Immersive Workbench looks like a large glass-topped table.
Three-dimensional images appear on top of the table to viewers wearing special
glasses. One person uses either a 3D mouse or a dataglove to move the images
around.

The display is being developed by researchers at three organisations—
the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) in Sankt
Augustin, Stanford University in California and Fakespace, a company in Silicon
Valley that specialises in virtual reality computer interfaces.

The 3D effect is achieved by a specialised computer from Silicon Graphics.
This stores all the images and alternates between sending images for the left
eye and those for the right to a digital projector. The system sends 120 images
a second to the projector—60 for the left eye and 60 for the right.

The viewing glasses have shutters synchronised to open and close as the
images are projected onto the glass table. So when the left eye image is
projected the right eye is covered. This makes the image appear on the table
rather than inside it.

Workbench will be useful for surgeons who want to plan operations based on
CAT scans of a patient’s body, says David Eggleston, a vice-president of
Fakespace. The system could also be used by architects at planning meetings. The
US military is looking at the Workbench for planning training manoeuvres.
Demonstrations of these applications were on display at SIGGRAPH, the computer
graphics and interactive computing conference, which was held in New Orleans
earlier this month.

Eggleston says one of the hardest achievements is getting the hardware and
software to work together in a way that seems natural. When the viewer points at
the part of the image they want to concentrate on, the image should change
quickly and smoothly. “You want to maintain the resolution and perspective,” he
says.

The exhibit, called Osmose, is the brainchild of Charlotte Davies, an artist working for a 3D graphics company called Softimage, based in Montreal, Canada. Davies hopes to challenge the popular image of virtual reality as a hard-edged medium that is only suitable for playing war games in outer space. Osmose instead uses a super fast Silicon Graphics computer to conjure up real-time, soft-edged, transparent images of trees, clouds, water and plants.

Visitors can either “immerse” themselves in Osmose using a headmounted display, or they can use polarising spectacles to look at a 3D projection of the images. For the first time, visitors wearing a headset can control their environment by changing their breathing. Davies wanted people to get a feeling of floating as if they were scuba diving. So they fill their lungs to float upwards and breathe out to tumble back down. People can also direct their journey with body movements such as bending forwards or to one side, for example.

Body position is calculated from the output of three sensors – one on the headset, one at the top of the spine and one at the bottom. The sensors are simple devices made by the US company Polhemus. They relay geometrical information to the computer, which adjusts the display to match.

Pressure sensors measure the expansion and contraction of the chest. “We originally put these close to the diaphragm and measured the expansion of that region,” says John Harrison, one of the design team working with Davies. “This, however, meant that the user had to be capable of deep breathing – or breathing into the stomach – something that divers, dancers and singers can do, but which is not so natural for those without this kind of experience. So we eventually decided to place the sensors on the ribcage.”

Harrison says that the biggest challenge was speed. “To give the user a sense of being surrounded by the computer-generated environment, no more than one-twentieth to one-thirtieth of a second can pass from measuring the position of the head to displaying the appropriate images.”

The exhibit has sparked interest from other virtual reality researchers. Mel Slater, who heads the virtual reality team at University College London, says: “Generally, I support the notion of trying to read as much information as possible from the human body. Using breathing is a novel idea, which should be explored.”

Walk into the museum’s gallery 38, and you may be “selected” by a video camera which will track your movements. This information is fed into a computer running a vision program that converts your image into a square with specific coordinates. Your position in the room is sent over a simple network to the computers that control a pair of wildlife videos. The result: your every movement is followed by the eye of a tiger, or perhaps a chimpanzee.

If this all becomes a bit disconcerting, you can always take a look at where you are putting your feet and there – larger than life – is a protozoan, doing what a protozoan does best. This image is projected live from a high-powered microscope. So the image that you see is of a living organism, albeit a little larger than the specimen squished under the microscope’s lens.

Also on the floor, under a Victorian structure rather like a cage suspended from the ceiling, is the image of a decomposing cow. Within minutes, you can watch a Friesian going from a black and white mass to a heap of bones, thanks to a variety of microorganisms, carrying out what Stammers says is all part of the evolutionary process.

The organisers include the Arts Catalyst and the Film and Video Umbrella, as well as the Natural History Museum itself. They stress that The Nature of History goes beyond what most museums can offer in terms of interactiveness. This is not just another question-and-answer display with a few coloured buttons and a Macintosh – the whole room is interactive.

It was the Film and Video Umbrella and the Arts Catalyst who commissioned The Nature of History as an example of science-inspired art to fit in with the theme of the Supernova 95 festival.

Robertshaw was chosen on the strength of previous installations, and his interest in evolution and biology – an interest that he furthered through contact with Stringer, who provided advice throughout the project’s development.

Robertshaw and Stammers acknowledge that their work is not purely educational, and that aesthetics play an important role. But both artists, hope that their approach to evolutionary biology will provoke a response from visitors. If that response is a thirst for more knowledge on human origins and evolutionary biology, then there is always the rest of the museum to explore.

Vortex is what Roach, scriptwriter and director, describes as an interactive movie. This is not a game which tries to trigger a rush of adrenaline by setting up competitive situations. Vortex is more of an exploration, where you can experience the story through the eyes and mind of the main character, Drew Griffin, “a young medical student running away from a tragic past”. And you will never experience the same movie twice, because there are hundreds of pathways and dozens of endings.

For Roach, Vortex represents the culmination of a project started more than two years ago. His original idea was to make a interactive movie called Quantum Gate, but tight deadlines meant that he had to skimp on the original project. Vortex, is therefore, the sequel to Quantum Gate, and represents Roach’s vision of how interactive movies should be made. In the year and half since the completion of Quantum Gate, there has been an improvement in the software tools for creating the graphics, formulating the interactive narrative and producing video.

These improvements are apparent in the quality of the images, and also in the ways in which the player can interact with the screen. Interactive sites are not just text in pop-up boxes, many are an integral part of the scene. Written text is not just courier type on a grey background, it can be like handwriting in a book. The software can also keep a record of the player’s responses, and the colours of writing and screens will change to reflect their “mood”.

For someone who has not been impressed with many of the games published on CD-ROM, and who could never quite understand what the fun is in flying a helicopter low over a barren landscape and shooting at fuel tanks, Vortex makes a welcome change. Even though the theme is a bit doomsday, eco-apocalypse, the quality of the images makes a couple of hours of exploration worth while.

Recommended system: PC 486DX, 8MB RAM, 15 MB hard disc, MS Win3.1, Double Speed CD-ROM Drive, SVGA display.

World Wide Web pages rely on the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which can specify text designs, and provide links to graphics and animations that are stored in various other formats. It can also provide links to other Web pages.

There is currently no standard way to view 3D images. So anyone who wants to send such an image – for example a computer-designed model of a new engine – over the Internet, may have trouble ensuring that the people on the receiving end have the right software to decode the file. At the moment, that usually means the people at each end have to buy proprietary engineering design software.

By offering Virtual Reality Modelling Language software for nothing, Silicon Graphics hopes VRML will become the format most people will use for 3D graphics. Mark Hughes, European marketing manager for Silicon Graphics’ Visual Magic division, says that once a standard is established, it will open up a host of new applications. For example, manufacturers could use the standard format to post 3D pictures of their wares on a Web page and be confident that most people will be able to view them. Hughes believes that people will eventually want to produce 3D virtual “spaces”, such as a shopping mall or a fantasy environment for a game.

VRML is based on Silicon Graphics’ Open Inventor ASCII file format, which can describe 3D scenes, complete with shading. The company has added the capability to link 3D images to other information, in the same way that HTML links pages of text together.

Tony Simons, a lecturer in computer science at the University of Sheffield, says that VRML’s 3D imagery “produces a more natural metaphor for exploring the Internet”, as well as extending the information available to people browsing on the Net.

Silicon Graphics is giving free access to the tools needed to develop software packages for viewing the images. Template Graphics Software, a San Diego-based company, is working with Silicon Graphics on a viewing package called WebSpace, which will work with text browsing packages such as Mosaic and Netscape. WebSpace will be available for PCs running Microsoft Windows and Windows NT, Power Macintosh systems and a range of computers that run the Unix operating system. Early versions of the viewers will be available this month.

Theoretical physics and contemporary dance are not obvious partners, but Smedley hopes to prove that science and art do mix, with her fast-moving and vibrant choreography that includes an entropy tea party, pyrotechnics and even a daring sequence with a trapeze.

Smedley will be performing her piece at The Place Theatre in London on 21 and 22 March as part of London’s spring dance festival “Spring Loaded”, which happens to coincide with the second National Week of Science, Engineering and Technology – SET95.

“I’ve always been interested in unusual collaborations,” says Smedley whose last dance performance took place on a climbing wall and involved rock climbers as well as dancers. She likes to make works that are interesting to people who do not follow dance. Smedley’s interest in quantum physics came after reading a book on fields of potential. She was so intrigued that she ended up at Imperial College, London, questioning experts in quantum mechanics.

With “Talking of the Sex of Angels”, Smedley hopes that she has come up with an idea that will attract people who are interested in science. And although Jonathan Halliwell, from Imperial College’s Theory Physics Group, says that you are unlikely to leave the theatre with a thorough knowledge of quantum mechanics, you may be inspired to find out more about the subject. If nothing else, you may find yourself enjoying the spectacle of the dance.