ongoing

completed

Traces

Traces, led by Simon Penny in collaboration with Jeffrey Smith, Andre Bernhardt, and Jamie Schulte, is an installation for the CAVE virtual reality system. In Traces, users’ body movements generate 3-dimensional traces which share their physical space, and with which they can interact.

In traditional VR systems, the body is an afterthought, left behind when the headset is put on. The goal of Traces was to develop a kind of VR installation where it is possible instead to have strong bodily experiences. Traces is an installation for the CAVE VR display, a small room onto whose walls 3D images are projected. When users enter wearing 3D glasses, they have the illusion of being surrounded by virtual objects in real, physical space, while they can still look down and see their own bodies. In Traces, vision cameras detect the movement of users, allowing them to leave behind and interact with traces of physical movements that seem to surround them. Gradually, the traces become more autonomous, turning into “Chinese dragons” which flock together and sense and react to users’ physical movements.

Traces was installed at Ars Electronica ’99, where users leapt, ran, skipped, did cartwheels, and came out of the CAVE sweating. Users had strong reactions to the Chinese dragons; though the dragons were not particularly intelligent, they seemed strongly alive and present to human users because they shared the same physical space. With Traces, it became clear that physical interaction and shared physical space with (embodied) users is a way to create meaningful, powerful experiences.