A way to join and fly in places of beauty
It is useful in understanding the artistic nature of the medium of interactive virtual worlds to first understand the key technical means that it relies on and how these have reached a stage of development to support a new medium and the new expressive language of that medium.
The new language of virtual experience
The fundamental basis of the medium is a rendering infrastructure, where rendering is used to mean 'realizing' the declarative description of a 'score' consisting of a composition of objects and streams from various media types such as geometry, images, vector graphics and video, sound, music and speech, and possibly others as well. In addition there must be a means of navigating a camera viewpoint in the world, the 'world' being the sum of all possible experiences on the virtual stage specified by the script and consisting of light and animation and sound. The main technical requirement of the medium is that there be sufficient rendering capability present relative to the specified complexity of the world to permit a rate of state update able to give a convincing illusion of 3D, continuous motion and instantaneous response. The rapid development of better and better hardware, especially for polygon and pixel rendering, means that more and more complex worlds can be designed which maintain an adequate rendering rate. to learn more go -->
