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LA ACM SIGGRAPH 2002-2003 Executive Council
Chair:
Alan Botvinick
Associate
Chair: Claudia Sumner
Vice
Chair: Erin Dalli
Associate Vice Chair: Tim Everingham
Secretary: Fran Zandonella
Treasurer: Jeff Chan
Chair Emeritus: Joan Collins Carey
Executive Advisor/Past
Chair: Diane Piepol
Past Chair: Genny Yee
Past Chair: Aliza Chameides
Membership Chair: Cathy Blanco
Membership
Secretary: Andrew Milne
Webmaster: Janet
Gervers
Publicity Chair: Diana Lee
SIGGRAPH Tech Chair: Howard Neely
SIGGRAPH Art Chair: Sheri Burnham
Committee
Members:
Diane Solomon, Zachary Taylor, James Guilford
Bold
indicates elected officers.
Executive Council meetings are held on the third Tuesday of the month.
If you would like to attend call the SIGphone at 310.288.1148.
Newsletter Contributors:
Art
Direction: Janet Gervers
Writers: Suzanne Lezotte,
Janet Gervers
Newsletter Archives:
Games
As A Realm of Possibilities (continued)
By Timothy Everingham
People dream of having
a holodeck in their own home.
However, we will have a few steps in that direction
before the full holodeck. That will probably take the
form of setting aside a virtual reality room. The room
could be darkened to low light conditions and built
for reduction of outside sounds. A platform would
sense your waking movements toward direct directions
even though you would only be walking in place (Shown
at the SIGGRAPH Conference by the Tokyo Institute of
Technology). A classic VR helmet and gloves, it not a
full VR sensory suit, would be connected to a control
center wirelessly. The control unit would not just
send its output to those experiencing virtual reality
in the room, but to the residence’s home theater so
their friends and family could share in the
experience. With broadband Internet access a person’s
virtual reality experience could be shared with
another person on the other side of the globe,
including a shared VR experience with other people in
similar VR rooms. This way you can journey to far away
places together as virtual tourists or share in a
fight against an evil horde. Imagine that you and
another person sharing the experience of jumping off a
mountain and gliding on your parachutes to the floor
of the glacier carved river valley far below, yet your
partner is thousands of miles away. This is something
we can look forward to later this decade.
Lets not just make a room your gaming venue, but your
entire house. A lot of people have artificial plants
in their homes. What may be coming is something
similar to artificial plants with artificial
intelligence. At the SIGGRAPH Conference the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab showed
a miniature garden with simulated robotic life forms
driven be artificial intelligence that look like the
sponges and tube worms that attach themselves to rocks
on the ocean floor. They thrive or sulk according to
how they are treated by humans and their environmental
surroundings. What could develop from these may be a
number of robotic life forms that look like plants and
act like a cross between plants and animals. Your
entire house can turn into a game by placing these
robotic life forms around the house. Your interactions
with then and what you do to their environment will
reflect back on how they behave. Of course if you have
live houseplants you are doing something like this
already, the major difference is if you mess up with
the real plants they die and with the robotic life
forms you just have to reboot them.
There
are and will be some good computer gaming
experiences while you are waiting for this high tech
future. The most anticipated online game is Star Wars
Galaxies, a joint venture by Lucas Arts and Sony
Online Entertainment. It is a massive multiplayer game
that makes Everquest look puny and will be released
before the end of 2002. Electronic Arts’ The Sims
broke the belief that you cannot have a major hit
where a majority of the players are women. The Sims
Online, to be released this fall, should continue the
virtual human interaction; this time with real humans
behind the virtual ones. One of the trends is instead
of blasting your way through a problem is to instead
use stealth, which Ubi Soft’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter
Cell is the most celebrated. If you just want to vent
there is Sierra’s Malice where you get to play a
redheaded teenage girl with a mallet as big as she is.
For those who want to vent with guns there is
Microsoft/Budgie Studio’s Halo. Kingdom Hearts and
Blink mentioned earlier are good and innovative. Fans
of classic platform games will gravitate toward the
most recent Mario Brothers title, Super Mario Sunshine
(Nintendo); but Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus
(Sony) is probably better. Coming soon will be
Lionhead Studios’ Ego Project where you develop where
you develop a character through their entire life and
your success reputation, and how people treat you will
be determined by the decisions you make. Will you be a
hero admired by all or a feared villain? You start at
18 and the game ends when you are 70(Black & White is
out now with some similar themes). Look for Rise of
Nations by Microsoft/Big Huge Games in Spring 2003,
which is a significant step forward in the real-time
strategy category. In 2003 look for a force feedback
sword possibly in conjunction with a VR helmet
(Courtesy the University of Tokyo I used it to fight
off some virtual ninjas at SIGGRAPH and loved it).
There is a lot of good games out there, but be
cautious of those based on movies and TV because
sometimes so much is paid for the rights to produce
the game that there is not enough money left to
develop a good game. There are a lot of game reviews
online, so do some research before you buy.
We have a great line up of computer generated
interactive entertainment now, but it is nothing
compared what is come. As Will Wright expressed, we
are entering an age where computer games will become
“A Realm of Possibilities”. This probably holds true
for computer-generated entertainment in general as
well. I expect to see you in a few years on the
holodeck.
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