Genesis is an interactive installation, where a player is able to play god. The installation consists of a 1x1m table and 7 cubes, which represent the More

Genesis is an interactive installation, where a player is able to play god. The installation consists of a 1x1m table and 7 cubes, which represent the 7 elements of this game: Mankind, Water, Forrest, Cereals, Animals, Mountains and Fire. A beamer projects a 2D game scenario onto the table and the cubic elements are tracked by a video camera. The player is invited to create his own "good" world, where all of the elements can exist side by side. If the elements are arranged unequally, the world collapses and results in conflagration, flooding, hunger and other horrible things. To avoid that, the user has to position the elements carefully in his world. A simple example: If you are seeding cereals without nearby water, the cereals will dry up, which causes a lack of food for animals and humans, and they also survive in this world. The position is very important. To place fire you have to make sure not to set the forest on fire, but also keep in mind that the fire should not be extinguished by the water. Finishing one game will take about one to two minutes. At the beginning of the game, only a brown ground is visible. After the first object is placed, an animated graphic will be displayed at the position of the cubes. Once you placed an object in the game the position cannot be changed. During the positioning, the player can watch the development of his world and has to react to emerging catastrophes with the help of the remaining elements. After the placing of all the cubes, the player can watch for approximately 20 seconds the growth of his world. At the end he gets a highscore and a short analysis how good he used his elements. The aim of this installation is to enable users to interact with a simulated virtual world. Genesis is a simple game, so that everybody can play it. Small children as well as older people are attracted by the lovely graphics and animations, as well as the nice sounds. The visitors of an exhibition are curious about the cubes and have to find out about its meaning by moving them onto the table. Since it is a fast and simple game, the gamers are motivated to try it again and again, and beat former highscores from friends and strangers. During the involvement with the game, the user thinks about the usage and assignment of the different natural elements. The connections between them are shown and the player becomes a feeling of the optimal use of only few resources. The project has been developed in C++. ARTag is used for tracking the objects and resolving the coordinates and types of the different cubes. Once an object has been finally placed onto the table, the information will be given to the main application. The main program calculates with the input of these parameters the current state of the world. The graphic engine, which gets the information of the development status of an object, tries to arrange and generate a good appearance of the world, which will be projected. Also the sound depends on the state of the world. The music and graphics are completely self-made. The sounds are composed with Steinberg Cubase, and the graphics are drawn and animated with Macromedia Freehand and Flash. OpenGL is used for visualizing the graphics on the computer. The project was done at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg, Mediatechnology and -design Dept. by Fritz-Michael Gschwantner, Birgit Hajek, Markus Klopf, Christian Schafleitner and Bernhard Schmidt.
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James mccombe co-founder and CTO of Caustic Graphics demonstrates causticrt's ability to support dynamic geometry interactively without all of More

James mccombe co-founder and CTO of Caustic Graphics demonstrates causticrt's ability to support dynamic geometry interactively without all of the usual setup associated with each frame in traditional ray tracing systems. James also discusses the rationale for choosing opengl as a basis for Caustic Graphics developing the first API ever for raytracing. In the demonstration, causticrt raytraces the scene at VGA resolution, with 4 ambient occlusion samples. All geometry, shaders and camera can ...
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