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Mirroring Real Life in Second Life “I’m interested in game technology, but as an artist, I want to use it as a medium for exploring ideas,” says Joseph Farbrook, assistant professor in WPI’s Humanities and Arts and Interactive Media and Game Development programs and an artist who helps students learn to create provocative art using digital technology. Thus was born Strata-Caster, a virtual art installation that allows viewers to navigate an artificial world using a controller that looks — and behaves — like a wheelchair. Users sit in the chair and spin its wheels to move through a series of themed installation spaces — or rooms — that are projected on a large screen. The rooms were built in Second Life, the popular virtual-reality world where players can adopt identities, or avatars, of their choosing. Each space is filled with objects that Farbrook designed himself, or bought within Second Life. And therein lies the crux of the piece. “People are purchasing things in Second Life and making replicas of all the things we have in the real world,” Farbrook says. “We’re bringing our physical culture into a place where it doesn’t have any relevance. But we’re so programmed by our present culture that we can’t let go of it.” The notion that we are unnecessarily importing real-world concepts into virtual-reality environments applies to more abstract baggage, as well. Conflict, social hierarchy, economic disparity . . . these things are also replicated in Second Life, Farbrook says. “People say that’s just the way things are. But it’s not necessarily the way things have to be. These ideas have just become so ingrained in our culture that we take them for granted.” Hence the wheelchair. The idea, Farbrook explains, is to “de-familiarize” viewers by putting them in a setting they are not used to, and then have them roll through a series of environments that do much the same thing, thereby calling attention to “cultural constructions that are totally arbitrary, and that may not even be relevant to our time.” Making high-tech, high-concept art isn’t easy. The undergraduate computer science and robotics majors
who designed the wheelchair interface used light sensors to track the motion of the wheels, but Second Life only accepts arrow-key input or the letter-key equivalent. So after coding a virtual wheelchair that obeys the laws of physics, they had to translate all the wheel data into a series of keystrokes. It took a lot of work, but by the time Farbrook presented Strata-Caster at the 37th annual SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques in the summer of 2010, “the wheelchair really behaved like a wheelchair.” The conference organizers built an enclosed space for him veiled with big black curtains, and a projector was rigged to avoid casting shadows on a 15-foot diagonal screen. “It was a very immersive experience,” Farbrook says. A Virtual Assist for Surgeons Gregory Fischer is quick to point out the potential benefits of using robots and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to guide delicate surgical procedures like inserting electrodes deep in the brain or implanting tiny radioactive seeds in the prostate to kill cancerous tumors. For one thing, MRI images can be continuously updated, allowing doctors to compensate for the way internal organs shift and swell when poked and prodded by needles and probes. “Instead of working from stale images on a light box in an operating room, we are focusing on using real-time, hi-res images,” says the assistant professor of mechanical engineering. And using robotic devices to align and insert those needles and probes from inside the MRI scanner would obviate the need for doctors to work within the constraints of a tube that is roughly 5 feet long and 2 feet wide. There’s only one problem: MRI scanners wreak havoc on electronic devices, and electronic devices and metallic objects wreak havoc on MRI scanners. MRI scanners work by bathing patients in a magnetic field 30,000 to 60,000 times the Earth’s magnetic field, bombarding them with radio waves, and inter-