The future of the virtual world will soon be at your keypad.
UCSD announced plans this month to establish a new center on campus that will explore the future of virtual environments and digital media using one of the world’s most advanced computer servers.
To foster the development of UCSD’s new Center for Next-Generation Digital Media, IBM donated the System z10 Enterprise Class server to the university under the company’s Shared University Research grant.
The new center will be directed by current director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and visual arts professor Sheldon Brown. The IBM server will allow players to access the virtual-world computer program Brown created in 2006, known as the Scalable City, more smoothly at all times of the day from any remote location.
Through relationships established with Hollywood studios, CRCA and the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Brown and his team will attempt to merge cinema into the virtual world. They hope to ultimately provide users with the opportunity to produce their own screenplays, using avatars as actors.
‘By significantly increasing the experiential richness of virtual worlds, we think they will become a proving ground for creating and interconnecting digital media of all forms, starting with games and cinema,’ Brown said. ‘As virtual worlds and digital cinema develop more visual sophistication and cultural literacy about how we use them, they will start to intersect and will become much richer and more complex.’
Currently, with thousands of users online and thousands of objects to render, virtual-world navigators must transfer from server to server in order to journey through different parts of the world.
According to Brown, the z10 server is precisely what virtual-world exploration needs. The combination of its high processing ability with the computational power of IBM’s Cell/Broadband Engine makes real-time user interaction a possibility.
‘The IBM mainframe can look like a couple hundred computers in a cluster, or look like one giant computer,’ Brown said.
The IBM mainframe will be located in north campus’ San Diego Supercomputer Center. The new center is proposed to be located at Atkinson Hall, which also houses Calit2 and CRCA.
Research teams under Calit2 and CRCA, such as CRCA’s Experimental Game Lab, will team up to operate within the new center.
Even with the increased emphasis on collaboration, researchers working in Atkinson Hall will retain the research flexibility that they currently enjoy, according to Christopher Head, a visual-arts graduate student and a member of the EGL.
‘The EGL’s position as a lab under the umbrella of CRCA allows it to function in conjunction with other labs, universities and technology partners,’ he said. ‘As a non-corporately run lab, we have a lot of freedom as to what we’d like to do, especially in terms of acquiring and working with emerging technologies.’
Readers may contact Justin Gutierrez at [email protected].