October 28, 2003

Vincent John Vincent is a recent Canadian New Media Award winner for his pioneering work in Virtual Reality systems in particular those found at http://www.jestertek.com and http://www.vividgroup.com where viewer's actions are projected into environments on the screen and can interact with the environment through software analysis of the images. Vincent brought a working demonstration to the Sheridan Interactive Multimedia labs and gave a poignant talk on the growth and powerful fragmentation of the Virtual Reality community.

Virtual reality is certainly one of the stars of futuristic interactive multimedia and as such has had a lot to live up to and certainly has felt letdowns along the way. Still, recent movies such as minority report have brought realistic interfaces and advertising concepts to the minds of the mainstream. Vincent showed the learners the jester point system, which is being used for example by an automobile company at conferences to demonstrate their products merely by pointing fingers. So the technology is rapidly approaching and in the more conservative marketplace, is finding its way into many serious applications beyond gaming from medical to marketing.

Sheridan hopes that graduate designers and programmers will be able to apply their creativity and experience in building immersive, interactive environments to the hardware and software created by pioneers such as Vincent to extend interactive multimedia beyond the desktop computer and help grow Canada's multimedia industry in new and important directions.

Learners prepared McLuhan Tetrads for Virtual Reality based on the talk and on in-class research and presentations. A visit to the Sheridan Visualization Design Institute also contributed to background as they witnessed motion capture and game engine design being applied to all sorts of practical applications. The Tetrads are available at: http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/tetrads/virtualreality.html. Learners analyzed what the technology enhances, makes obsolete, retrieves and flips into. The lecture / lab experience is part of the Sheridan Multimedia Pioneering course where a new technologies with respect to Interactive Multimedia are examined and working samples are explored. The technologies are: