_Animation_
Two important personal experiences:
I've made a couple of animation's from the 'dogfood' project, using
Electric Image. This program makes extremely fast and smooth animation's,
and the camera-path was also made also very smooth. This gave a flowing
movement, and you actually sat there swaying your head along with the
movie, even though the on-screen window wasn't bigger than 320x240pixels.
It showed the potential of controlling the motion, especially in first
person views.
There's a game called ZOA on the Mac, where you fly around in space
shooting things (the usual stuff). The control can be set to 'up/down' plus
rotate (relative to the screen), which means you're not at all referring to
a horizon. When playing yourself it's bit hard to control your ship at
first, due to the uncommon way of navigating space, but you sort of manage
quickly. The trouble is to watch other people play, with the view spinning
around madly. It made me nauseous rather quickly. Showed how easy our
senses can be confused by discrepancies between balance nerve and visual
input.
The power of the moving image is far greater than the still, in more ways
than just the extra dimension would allow. It not only adds time, it gives
much stronger depth cues (esp. when panning) and it can give cues to
physical experiences like vertigo, flying, etc. There's potential both to
user controlled world and animation's of cyberspace.
The point when refering to VR is that some parts of system view-control is
a powerful narrative tool.
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Torbjoern Caspersen casper@due.unit.no
http://www.stud.unit.no/~casper/
Student of Architecture
at the Norwegian faculty of technology, NTH, Trondheim.