Electronic Arenas for Culture, Performance, Art and Entertainment
Authors: Monika Fleischmann, Wolfgang Strauss
European projects : eRENA
Project Dates Start September '97 - End August 2000

The eRENA project - electronic Arenas for Culture, Performance, Art and Entertainment - explores the representation of space in virtual space, multi-user environments and mixed realities in extended space, extended performance and inhabited TV. It develops new concepts for virtual and real performers (dancers, actors, musicians) and realizes novel concepts for the CAVE and other virtual environments as a virtual stage.

The eRENA project is one of thirteen European cooperating research projects on intelligent information interfaces - i3net - launched by Esprit Long-Term Research. These projects aim to explore and prototype radically new human-centered systems and interfaces for interacting with information, aimed at the broad population. More: i3 Project Summaries

Research Area/Keywords:
Multi-user virtual environments, social interaction, agents, crowds, mixed-reality, navigation, virtual spaces, networking.

Summary :
eRENA is focused on inhabited information spaces to support new forms of cultural experience spanning arts, performance and entertainment. We refer to these kinds of inhabited information spaces as electronic arenas.

eRENA will involve long term research into a range of "spatial technologies", especially multi-user virtual environments, coupled to new forms of artistic content and an understanding of social interaction. There are several reasons why this research is needed:

eRENA focuses on developing inhabited information spaces in which all participants can be mobile and socially active. Thus, audience members as well as performers and artists will be able to explore, interact, communicate with one another and participate in staged events.

eRENA directly addresses the issue of scale. Through concepts such as dynamic crowd aggregations, our electronic arenas will eventually support hundreds or thousands of simultaneous participants.

eRENA therefore aims to bridge the gap between current small scale, real-time communication technologies such as video conferencing and current massive-scale non-participative broadcast technologies such as television.

eRENA involves an integration of artistic, technical and social perspectives. This represents a fresh and important approach to the development of information technologies and will result in highly engaging and interactive interfaces and underlying systems. Given their potential use by every citizen, the kinds of applications being explored by eRENA represent a potentially large future market for IT; one in which Europe might gain an edge.

eRENA is structured around underlying research challenges, demonstrated through thematic spaces. The research challenges involve the three topics of: - production - addressing the spatial and temporal structuring of electronic arenas; - participation - addressing the representation and behavior of different participants in electronic arenas, including humans, agents and crowds; and - interaction - addressing navigation, unencumbered interaction and new forms of "mixed reality" boundaries between real and virtual space.

Questions and Methods
eRENA will publicly demonstrate and evaluate the results of these research challenges through thematic spaces which provide specific examples of electronic arenas. Initially, these thematic spaces will be based on the extension of the traditional cultural forms of galleries, performances and television. In the longer term, however, we will explore entirely new cultural forms appropriate to this new medium of expression.

Outcome
The outcomes of eRENA will include: new techniques for individual and mass participation in producing and shaping the content of virtual arenas; new ways of structuring electronic arenas so as to afford different modes of interaction, navigation and communication in different virtual spaces or at different stages of an event; powerful new techniques for embodying humans and agents in electronic arenas; mechanisms to support dynamic crowd aggregations, including crowd representations and mechanisms for managing crowd membership; new ways for groups and individuals to interact with shared and projected displays; technical support for building structured mixed realities out of boundaries between real and virtual space; and finally, the demonstration of these techniques through a series of public exhibitions and performances which are complemented by networked experiments over BT Futures Testbed ATM Network.

Partners

The eRENA consortium brings together internationally known digital artists from ZKM and GMD; experts in multi-user virtual reality and computer animation from EPFL, Geneva, Nottingham, KTH and GMD; social scientists from Nottingham and KTH; broadcasters from Illuminations and KTH; expertise in CAVEs and other projected interfaces from GMD and BT; and networking expertise from BT.