Sheldon Brown: The Art and Technology of better Virtual Worlds

Brown will describe his work to make better virtual worlds — addressing both their computational challenges as well as their expressive affordances. This comes out of work that Brown has been doing for over a decade in creating art installations that utilize virtual reality notions and technologies to pursue conceptually complex interests with a deliberate aesthetic. As the use of virtual worlds and muti-user online gaming environments has moved historically from experiment to speculation to novel experience, technological progress has allowed the field to move from the narrowly experienced to the broadly based, creating a primed culture for meaningful virtual worlds. Their creation requires more expressive and more complex approaches then are currently employed. Solutions to this will come from more imaginative applications of emerging technologies and more imaginative approaches to virtual world semantics. Brown will present his approaches to both of these areas as addressed in the development of his Scalable City project.