I3: Intelligent Information Interfaces Initiative
by Lennart Fahlén
Intelligent Information Interfaces,
or i3, is an Esprit Long-Term Research initiative. The aim of i3 (pronounced
'eye-cubed') is to develop new human centred interfaces for interacting
with information, aimed at the future broad population. i3 aims at a radical
departure from present-day human-machine interface concepts and does this
under the assumption that this can only be done guided by a long-term vision
intertwining human, societal and technological factors. The initiative
aims to launch research on new forms of interaction that will place people
as active participants rather than passive recipients of information.
Given their potential use by every citizen, the kinds of applications
being explored by eRENA, represent a potentially large future market for
IT; one in which Europe might gain an edge. The i3 initiative has a budget
of up to 25 million ECU.
eRENA focuses on developing inhabited information spaces in which all
participants can be mobile and socially active. Thus, audience members
as well as performers and artists will be able to explore, interact, communicate
with one another and participate in staged events. Our electronic arenas
will eventually support hundreds or thousands of simultaneous participants.
eRENA therefore aims to bridge the gap between current small scale, real-time
communication technologies such as video conferencing and current massive-scale
non-participative broadcast technologies such as television.
eRENA is structured around underlying research challenges, demonstrated
through thematic spaces. The research challenges involve the three topics
of: production - addressing the spatial and temporal structuring of electronic
arenas; participation - addressing the representation and behaviour of
different participants in electronic arenas, including humans, agents and
crowds; and interaction - addressing navigation, unencumbered interaction
and new forms of 'mixed reality' boundaries between real and virtual space.
The outcomes of eRENA will include: new techniques for individual and
mass participation in producing and shaping the content of virtual arenas;
new ways of structuring electronic arenas so as to afford different modes
of interaction, navigation and communication in different virtual spaces
or at different stages of an event; powerful new techniques for embodying
humans and agents in electronic arenas; mechanisms to support dynamic crowd
aggregations, including crowd representations and mechanisms for managing
crowd membership; new ways for groups and individuals to interact with
shared and projected displays; technical support for building structured
mixed realities out of boundaries between real and virtual space; and finally,
the demonstration of these techniques through a series of public exhibitions
and performances which are complemented by networked experiments over BT
Futures Testbed ATM Network.
The eRENA consortium brings together internationally known digital artists
from ZKM and GMD; experts in multi-user virtual reality and computer animation
from EPFL, Geneva, Nottingham, KTH and GMD; social scientists from Nottingham
and KTH; broadcasters from Illuminations and KTH; expertise in CAVEs and
other projected interfaces from GMD and BT; and networking expertise from
BT.
ESCAPE in I3 Heterogeneous Large Scale Landscapes
The last three years have seen a rapid growth in the development of
systems that adopt a spatial approach to the presentation of computer based
information. This has been fuelled by the increasingly ubiquitous nature
of the Internet and the maturing of 3D interaction techniques. This initial
shift has been recognised in the Inhabited Information Spaces schema of
the I3 initiative. However, despite the large number of research and commercial
explorations into virtual environments (including shared, multi-user virtual
environments), little or no consideration has been given to the development
of heterogeneous large scale landscapes capable of allowing a wide range
of different spaces to coexist. Rather an insular approach has been pursued
with each virtual environment being relatively separate from others. This
sets the research challenge of developing techniques which will allow a
wide variety of different approaches and spaces to co-exist successfully
in a seamless manner. Recognising and supporting this diversity of space
in itself requires a radical departure from existing considerations of
electronic environments. Indeed, it is unlikely that we will see the wide-scale
adoption of shared virtual environments in use by the general citizen unless
attention is paid to their integration and interconnection without disrupting
healthy variation between different environments as a function of their
application or of the social group they support or culture they have emerged
within.
The central challenge is the means by which future large scale electronic
environments will be realised. This requires fundamental research into
the formation of a suitable set of paradigms for these environments and
the demonstration of the application of these paradigms in practice. This
research is essentially multidisciplinary in nature and one of the unique
aspects of the eSCAPE proposal is that it brings together a set of previously
disparate traditions to address these issues in a concerted manner.
In particular the following skills and expertise are combined with eSCAPE
to extend the current limited considerations of inhabited information spaces.
VR Development: eSCAPE will build upon the experiences of SICS in developing
DIVE one of the most popular multi-user VR platforms in common use. Access
to the source code of DIVE will be complemented by the VR development experience
of the other partners at Manchester, Lancaster and ZKM. Studies of Use:
eSCAPE has as a central concern understanding use as a means of developing
the user centred interfaces requested by the I3 initiative. This tradition
grows from the use of ethnographic studies by Lancaster and Manchester
and has involved influential studies of the use of VR systems. VR Aesthetic:
eSCAPE also involves in a central role the artistic and aesthetic issues
central to the development of VR environments. This draws upon the traditions
of VR artists at ZKM and work at both SICS and Manchester.
Please contact:
Lennart Fahlén - SICS
Tel: + 46 70 6661539
E-mail: lef@sics.se
