For entertainment applications, a successful virtual experience based on a head-mounted display (HMD) needs to overcome some or all of the following problems: entering a virtual world is a jarring experience, people do not naturally turn their heads or talk to each other while wearing an HMD, putting on the equipment is hard, and people do not realize when the experience is over. In the Electric Garden at SIGGRAPH 97, we presented the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, a shared virtual environment experienced by more than 1,500 SIGGRAPH attendees. We addressed these HMD-related problems with a combination of back story, see-through HMDs, virtual characters, continuity of real and virtual objects, and the layout of the physical and virtual environments.
We present lessons learned from developing Alice, a 3D graphics programming environment designed for undergraduates with no 3D graphics or programming experience. Alice is a Windows 95/NT tool for describing the time-based and interactive behavior of 3D objects, not a CAD tool for creating object geometry. Our observations and conclusions come from formal and informal observations of hundreds of users. Primary results include the use of LOGOstyle egocentric coordinate systems, the use of arbitrary objects as lightweight coordinate systems, the launching of implicit threads of execution, extensive function overloading for a small set of commands, the careful choice of command names, and the ubiquitous use of animation and undo.
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Alice is a rapid prototyping system used to create three dimensional graphics simulations like those seen in virtual reality applications. Alice uses an interpreted language called Python as its scripting language to implement user actions. This interactive development environment allows users to explore many more design options than is possible in a compiled language environment. The alpha version of Alice for Windows 95 is available for free over the intemet, with the beta release scheduled for August.
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