For the past couple
of years, IMTC has been working on a variety of augmented reality
(AR) research projects in collaboration with Blair MacIntyre and
his Augmented
Environments Lab.
Whereas Virtual Reality technology involves totally immersing the
user in an entirely virtual world, with Augmented Reality you
are overlaying virtual objects, information, sounds etc. over the
real world. The result is an augmentation of the user’s perceptions.
One
of the AR projects that we have been working on is titled “Three
Angry Men.” In the past, AR has often been used for things
like maintenance, production, and military applications. We are interested
in exploring the uses of AR for entertainment, informal education,
and as a dramatic medium. Three Angry Men is an experiment in using
AR technology to present a dramatic narrative that allows the user
to experience the same story from multiple points of view. The user
participates in an AR version of the famous twentieth-century play, “Twelve
Angry Men,” which
for practical reasons we have abbreviated into a scene involving
3 characters (thus, “Three Angry Men”). The participant
finds herself immersed in a physical jury-room, where virtual characters
(jurors in the drama, rendered as video-based characters overlaid
at appropriate 3D locations around the physical table using a see-through
head-worn display) debate the guilt of a young man on trial for murder.
The goal of this experience is to dramatize the idea that different
people perceive events differently, depending on their
beliefs, backgrounds, prejudices, and so on. The participant is tracked
as she moves around the table, and when she sits in one of the three
chairs, she occupies the point of view of that juror, temporarily
entering the character’s mind and hearing his inner thoughts.
The six minute scene uses the same script for each point of view,
but the
experience is different; the inner thoughts of each character color
the spoken text, and each character may appear strong or weak, neat
or shabby, thoughtful or dithering, depending on the personality
of the juror viewing them.This experience is powerful, however, because
it is more than just three different interpretations of the same
script: the participant experiences the debate not as three linear
scenes, but as a mixture of the three points of view. The participant
directly controls the viewpoint by physically moving around the room;
the scene pauses when she stands and continues from the appropriate
first-person point of view when she sits in one of the three juror’s
chairs. Thus, each participant’s experience is different, depending
on how she moves around, and her perception of the debate is shaped
by the
combination of viewpoints that she experienced.
A successor to the Three Angry Men project is in the works, entitled
Four Angry Men, building on lessons learned in the Three Angry
Men project.
click on a thumbnail below for a larger view (JPG: 640 x 480)
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images from a test of 3 Angry Men
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