world5

A way to join and fly in places of beauty

This brings us to the notion of 'montage' in virtual worlds. It is too complex to fully discuss here, and still not fully understood in any case. However, it is useful to point out that rendering 'switches' provide traditional 'cuts', and camera navigation provides the traditional camera pan tilt track and zoom. Additional new techniques consist of 'scale change' which provides a means to perform a 'continuous cut' by context and size reference, and 'change of identity' which provides a means to smoothly adjust the personal context of perception within the same 'objective' scene. What is awaited is the 'Eisenstein' of interactive virtual worlds to create a fairly complete taxonomy of non-linear montage which defines the medium according to a 'grammar' of viewpoint change in order to suggest narrative development in space and time and identity.

The new language of virtual experience

The artistic aspect of interactive virtual worlds which is bound most closely to technical aspects of the medium is the seamless surface of various media types unified by a simulated 3D spatial and temporal experience. This 'sensory surface' consists of sound, music, speech, images, vector graphics, text, video, geometry, and lighting. In particular, since the lights and cameras are virtual and do not exist in time and space it is easy to create lighting and camera angles and positions which would be impossible on real sets.

Finally, an interesting aspect of the medium which may possibly be used is a multi-user 'shared' presence. This is the case that two or more navigating identities may move and communicate within the context of the same 'illusion' of a shared world, much like we do in 'reality'.