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Virtual
Raft Project |
Team: Professor Bill Tomlinson Man Lok Yau Jesse Gray Eric Baumer Jessica O'Connell Ksatria Williams So Yamaoka Sara Goetz Description The Virtual Raft Project is a multidisciplinary undertaking seeking to create communities of believable autonomous characters that inhabit heterogeneous networks of computational devices. In particular, the project is interested in allowing the characters to break the plane of the traditional desktop screen. To this end, we have designed an interactive installation featuring a novel tangible paradigm for interacting with the characters. This paradigm involves the use of a mobile device, such as a Tablet PC or handheld computer, as a “virtual raft” by which a character may be transported among several virtual worlds. By enabling the character on the raft to react in real time to the raft’s motion in real space, this installation encourages participants to become physically engaged with virtual characters. We believe that this physical engagement can lead to an increase in the believability of the characters. Video Please watch a short video about the project. (~33MB, ~3.5 min, requires the free Quicktime 6 player.) Also, here is another video of a group of homeschooled children and their parents interacting with the system. (~27MB, ~4 min, requires Quicktime 6). (Here is a version of the video that will work with older versions of Quicktime. The video is the same as above, but the file is ~63MB). Images 
A "virtual raft" is brought up to a "virtual island." A community of autonomous characters When the raft is tipped, the character needs to
Publications
B. Tomlinson. 2005. "A Heterogeneous Animated Platform for Educational Participatory Simulations." In: 10th Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL 05) conference. Taipei, Taiwan. (To appear.)
B. Tomlinson, J. Gray, M. L. Yau. 2005.
“Multiple Virtual Rafts: A Multi-User Paradigm for Interacting with
Communities of Autonomous Characters.” In: Late Breaking Results (Interactive Poster), ACM Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems (CHI
2005), Portland, OR.
It will also be shown at: 
The version of the project shown at Cal-(IT)2
worked Jessica O'Connell, SURP Multidisciplinary Seminar, UCI, March 2005 Man Lok Yau, SURP Multidisciplinary Seminar, UCI, March 2005 Bill Tomlinson, Cal-(IT)2 opening (tours), November 2004. Man Lok Yau, Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Research, November 2004 Bill Tomlinson, UCI Informatics Seminar, October 2004 Bill Tomlinson, ASU Artist's Lecture, September 2004
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