(Events)

Avatar Farm



Avatar Farm was an Inhabited TV event which was performed and streamed live over the web, during the weekend of June 17-18, 2000. Set within four fantastical electronic worlds, Avatar Farm aimed to create, both for participants and for those watching a linear webcast, an engaging story and believable characters. Earlier Inhabited Television projects had demonstrated the technical potential of the form, but before Avatar Farm none of the other events had proved to be engaging for an audience.

Professional actors and members of the public took on the personae of avatars and engaged in a semi-scripted, tightly plotted fable involving gods and tricksters, innocents abroad, lizards and purple tufts. The settings and some of those taking part were carried over from Ages of Avatar, a collaborative project with Sky's [.tv] channel in Britain.

Avatar Farm was mounted utilising Nottingham's MASSIVE-3 collaborative virtual environment system. Each of four 20-minute episodes was mixed as television and webcast, but every 3-D detail of all the events within the widely dispersed worlds was also captured, along with the audio. Indeed during the episodes, fully 3-D playbacks of earlier events were triggered and viewed in the worlds. MASSIVE-3's sophisticated functionality enables this 3-D recording and playback, which can also be utilised as a powerful post-production system for the creation of new kinds of animation and virtual experiences. In the summer of 2000, for example, simultaneous scenes from different viewpoints within Avatar Farm were projected in the immersive environment of ZKM's EVE dome. In MASSIVE-3, and specifically in the system called temporal links that facilitates these capabilities, this project has nurtured a tool for the art of tomorrow with a myriad of potential uses.

Please also look at the Illuminations Television Avatar Farm page.


Contents


Timetable

Streamed live over the web, during the weekend of June 17-18, 2000.


Support

eRENA i3 ESPRIT, EPSRC MNIT project


Links

The following are links to related pages and files:

People

Images and Video Clips

Images (click on thumbnails for larger images) Video

(warning) These are big files.

Documents

Associated Applications

Contributing Technologies

Enabling Systems

Associated Projects

Publications

Associated Events



URL:
http://www.crg.cs.nott.ac.uk/events/avatarfarm/
Author:
Communications Research Group ( - Department of Computer Science)
Created by Mike Craven:
23 June 2000
Last-modified by Mike Craven:
19 Sept 2000