CAVE

My proposal for ELO’s gathering consists of both a paper and a demonstration to be presented simultaneously. My paper will first review the relationship between VR, performance, and language manipulation. After this summary, I will then propose the next iteration of this embrace, an environment that, like the CAVE project, provides the user with a textually creative and interactive experience. I will then provide an exploratory first stage of ongoing research in the modification of an existing gamespace, Mojang’s sandbox world generator Minecraft, which will render the Text(ured) environment into a viable compositional space. Through the creation and manipulation capabilities provided with Minecraft, I will then illustrate the numerous potentials for text creation and manipulation in the virtual landscape.

Finally, my paper will posit several subsequent projects that depart from Minecraft mods to renegotiate the user’s relationship to the textual environment within virtual and augmented realities. These include the development of a VR Processing compiler that allows users to manipulate the code structures and modules through sensory input, the potential benefit for accessibility, as well as the possible opportunities provided by augmented reality (AR) devices

(Source Author Abstract)

The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop founded by Robert Coover, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word. From 2002 onward writers have explored the possibilities of spatial hypertext in an immersive environment. What this paper proposes is an exploration of the history of the twin currents of hypertext and virtual reality that merged to create this particular form of expression, going back to the early hypertext systems developed at Brown University in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson/van Dam/et al and work in immersive virtual reality at University of Illinois’ CAVE in the early 1990s.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

Push aside the thick, dark curtain, step across the cables on the floor and you'll find yourself standing on a white floor with white screens in front of you and to each of your sides. Above you are projectors and speakers. You're given a pair of goggles and a glove. You put them on and wait for Screen to begin. The space darkens. A voice begins to read: "In a world of illusions, we hold ourselves in place by memories." In the dark there is nothing for you to do but listen.

Screen is a literary work that can only be experienced in a Cave. In a Cave, images -- or in the case of Screen, words -- are projected on all three walls and on the floor. When you stand in the Cave wearing goggles, you experience the projected images as a three dimensional space in which you can move around. The goggles and glove allow the Cave to track your position, so you can control the environment by moving your body and your hand.

Light over the sill of an unshadedbedroom window, into a woman's eyes.She turns away, slips half back under sleep.

Words cover the three screens in the Cave and are read aloud as you follow them with your eyes. Each wall's words describe a double moment in time, a woman or a man remembering and feeling the memory slip away, hidden by the present.

She uncurls her arm,reaches back to lay her hand acrosshis thigh, to welcome him home,but touches only a ridge of sheet, sun warmed, empty.

"We hold ourselves in place by memories," the first voice reads to you in the dark. These narrated memories refuse to stay still. After the voices have read the text aloud the words start to peel off the walls. You can try to catch them with your gloved hand, and for a while you may succeed in forcing them back where they belong, but before too long the words crash all around you. This experience in virtual reality is very different from the Holodeck vision of total immersion in a make-believe world. Screen does not attempt to replicate a real-world environment, but instead immerses the user in a reflexive literary representation, one in which words and narrative remain predominant.

Screen was created collaboratively by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, and Josh Carroll. They developed the piece in the Cave Writing Workshop at Brown University, which is led by Robert Coover. In December we visited the Cave and were able to experience several works created in the workshop, including Screen, as well as Vesper Stockwell, Dmitri Lemmerman, et al's "This is Just a Place," an interpretation of a poem by A.R. Ammons; "Hypertable;" and a work in progress, set in a local flat. After the Cave demo, we spoke with Joshua Carroll, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Robert Coover. The interview is divided into three sections: in the first we discuss the specific experience of collaborating on Screen with Josh and Noah, in the second Robert Coover discusses the Cave writing workshops in the context of his experience teaching electronic writing at Brown, and in the third we discuss Screen with Noah in the context of his other work in electronic writing.

(Source: Introduction to the interview at The Iowa Review Web)

In experimental hypertext fiction workshops at Brown University, undergraduate writers work with programmers to create interactive literary experiences in immersive virtual reality. To involve the writer more directly in the process of implementation, we have created CaveWriting: spatial hypertext authoring system. Authors can manipulate a graphical front-end to position text, multimedia, and 3D models within virtual space, apply special effects, and create hyperlinks which initiate theatrical events. The result can be previewed at any time inside a desktop window. This talk will cover the past and present of cavewriting at Brown and its future at UIUC, UCSD, and beyond.

The paper proposes a descriptive (i.e., non-hermeneutical/presence-driven) reading of the virtual reality work Screen by Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al. (2002) designed for Brown University’s CAVE. Because of the non-triviality of its demands, one might argue that Screen is as much about its theme (memory/forgetting) as it is a self-referential study on VR as a literary medium. In this context, seemingly incompatible notions such as those of "flickering signifiers" (Hayles, 1999) and “presence effects” (Gumbrecht, 2004) can operate as coextensive tropes of analysis. Are we to speak of a new phenomenology of language wherein processing protocols precede literary semiosis? Does proprioceptive awareness of the linguistic mark not also trigger a concurrent semiotic reaction obligatorily leading to an act of interpretation? Or is the immediacy of the de-anchored text in the CAVE more intimately related to what Gumbrecht characterizes as “being in sync” with the things of the world or, with a nod to Heideggerian ontology, Erleben (lived experience) that exceeds Wahrnehmen (perception) and precedes Erfahrung (interpreted knowledge)?

(Source: author's abstract)