Educational and Experimental Goals
The goal of this project is to combine research in mobile computing, interactive animation and restoration ecology in order to develop a novel computational platform for environmental education. This platform will serve as the basis for regionally specific interactive exhibits that will be installed in science centers and museums in each of the fifty United States.
The interactive platform consists of a heterogeneous network of fixed and mobile computational systems, inhabited by autonomous animated agents (biological species). This paradigm involves several stationary computer screens that serve as "virtual habitat patches" inhabited by small populations of animated species, and several Tablet PCs that serve as "virtual rafts," or dispersal mechanisms, with which people carry the species from patch to patch. This platform is derived from the Virtual Raft paradigm developed by Prof. Tomlinson and his research group in 2004.
The EcoRaft Project extends this system by enabling it to include animated animals and plants that are ecologically accurate species, and to use handheld devices as well as Tablet PCs as virtual rafts. Currently, Prof. Tomlinson has agreements with Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, CA, and with the International Wolf Center in Ely, MN, to host initial exhibits created with this system.
The project is the first collaboration between Bill Tomlinson, Assistant Professor of Informatics and Drama, and F. Lynn Carpenter, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. With support from the Nicholas Foundation Prize, the investigators are developing a functional prototype of an interactive environmental exhibit that represents an attractive and compelling ecosystem. In addition, research conducted to create this project has the potential for application in a diverse range of other fields, including mobile and ubiquitous computing, computational biology, and new forms of entertainment and education.
Publications
The following published articles are related to the project and its development:
B. Tomlinson, M. L. Yau and J. Gray. 2005. “Heterogeneous Character Animation: How to make an interactive character jump between stationary and mobile graphical computers” In: SIGGRAPH 05 Sketches.
B. Tomlinson. 2005. “Negative Behavior Space in the Design of Interactive Agents.” In: Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 05) Conference, Marina del Rey, CA. AAAI Press.
B. Tomlinson. 2005. “A Heterogeneous Animated Platform for Educational Participatory Simulations.” In: 10th Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL 05) Conference, Taipei, Taiwan.
B. Tomlinson, J. Gray, M. L. Yau. 2005. “Multiple Virtual Rafts: A Multi-User Paradigm for Interacting with Communities of Autonomous Characters.” In: ACM Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems (CHI 2005), Late Breaking Results (Interactive Poster), Portland, OR.
B. Tomlinson, M. L. Yau, J. O’Connell, K. Williams, S. Yamaoka. 2005. “The Virtual Raft Project: A Mobile Interface for Interacting with Communities of Autonomous Characters.” In: Conference Abstracts and Applications, ACM Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems (CHI 2005), Portland, OR.
B. Tomlinson. 2005. “Designing Affective Interaction Paradigms for Animated Characters.” In: Human Computer Interaction Consortium Winter Meeting (HCIC 05), Fraser, CO.
Press
Birds fly off the screen to teach ecology
The Virtual Raft Project: bridging the virtual and physical worlds
Nicholas Foundation Prize for Cross-Disciplinary Research Awarded at UCI
Eureka! Day Introduces Girls to Calit2@UCI Research
Last updated: July 29, 2005