Friday, December 24, 2004

Picturing an Exhibition



The Citris Gallery Builder is a Croquet-based collaborative virtual gallery construction and viewing tool for the humanities. Its one of several interactive collaboration tools for humanists being developed at Berkeley by Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy in collaboration with the students and staff of Citris. The Gallery Builder is being designed with the goal of allowing non-technical users to easily build 3D virtual galleries which contain images, movies, audio, and 3D objects of various types. The galleries are then able to be viewed and modified collaboratively by members of a Croquet place.



Building the gallery is done in a familiar 2D floorplan mode, where the user lays out walls and positions media on the walls or in the space via drag-and-drop capabilities from a content browser into the 2D view. The gallery is then also viewable in 3D. Ultimately, the team at Berekley hopes that this technology will contribute to promoting cooperative interaction between geographically distributed real-world sites through realistic reconstruction of those sites in virtual space in real-time. Special thanks to Orion Elenzil and Tao Starbow who braved the bleeding edge in rolling this out. We salute you!

Click here for more information about the Croquet-based Citris Gallery Builder.

2 comments:

Howard Stearns said...

I wonder why positioning is done in 2D. Why not just have the (animated) ability to fly up to a plan viewing position, or an aligned elevation, but still within the usual virtual 3D environment. Why introduce separate modes of use?

Anonymous said...

By the way, this image runs just fine on Linux. The site says that it is only available for Windows. But if Squeak does what it's supposed to do, that should be irrelivant. And indeed it is.