Panel Statement

Panel: The Invisible Planet

This paper describes the networked virtual reality application, Virtual Polis a three dimensional city, inclusive of a high-rise building, private domiciles, art museum, stores and a park. Tele-existence is an essential aspect, as potentially the city can be inhabited by a multitude of participants, each with their own purposes. As much as a grand social experiment, it also is a far reaching graphical user interface (GUI) for cultural experience, electronic home shopping, and entertainment. The city is discussed from technical, sociological and semantic viewpoints. The salient points of the virtual city include: – a distributed, three dimensional inhabitable environment – investigation of tele-existence in a distributed virtual construct – capability of supporting potentially unlimited participants – private spaces, property and moral code
exploration of tools to alter the environment, while inhabiting it – interface (GUI) for home shopping and entertainment.

The premier of the Virtual Polis Version 2.0 prototype was presented at Virtual Reality OSLO-94 where end users explored the city, as a dynamic example of networked virtual reality. The Virtual Polis is produced by Carl Eugene Loeffler, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University.

• Carl Eugene Loeffler [USA, 1946-2001] is [in 1994] Project Director of Telecommunications and Virtual Reality, at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University,  Pittsburgh, USA. He is also a visiting Senior Scientist, appointed to Center of Technology at Kjeller (UNIK/University of Oslo and Norwegian Telecom Research). Specialist in the design of applications and systems integration for distributed virtual reality; under his direction, the CMU project team has produced a number of networked virtual reality applications for the purposes of education, entertainment and industry. The applications support multiple uses, and feature aspects of tele-existence. His current project is a distributed virtual city, which is conceived as a graphical user interface (GUI) for home based electronic shopping and entertainment. Current technical demonstrations include the International Conference on Artificial reality and Tele-Existence,