Elaborate Ideas.

For "obvious" extensions to our system in terms of rowing, see our working notes. Multiple rowers, 3D texture based rivers, spatial movement, all that is taken as granted. In what directions can we leap?

Insect vision

Insects have compound eyes, each eye composed of many facets (omatidia). Each facet has its own seperate lens, a small collection of nerve cells, and a single exiting nerve fiber. Each facet points in a slightly different direction resulting in a form of mosaic vision - each facet sees a slightly different portion of the visual field. It is unknown how well this technique performs as viewing detail, but it is superior to the compound eye for rapid movement.

Typical values for the number of facets in each eye are 4000 (housefly), 9000 (beetle), 3900/6300/13000 (queen/worker/drone bee).

What happens when the number of facets equals the number of seats available? Can we utilise the response from the audience as the vote from an individual facet? Does 40 humans one bee make? We now would have a flight simulator with the intelligence of a bee, flying based on the wishes of the nerves.

We would use selection of landmarks to control our flight path. The smell of honey would be replaced by a sound. A small number of sounds would be sufficent to allow navigation through the world.

Audience feedback

Lets say we want to push the rowing system further. Can we process the audience? If so, there is code out in the world which can extract faces from the audience. We could then map those faces onto our characters - one way of ensuring everyone knew who was who.

Funky Audience feedback

Lets say we can process the audience, but yet can't extract faces. Just plop the sides of the room up on screen, every seat having a leg. The legs can act as the paddles for rowing, and just as for rowing, we can move spatial. We now have a magic carpet which we've taught people how to use from rowing. Hey presto, off again, trampling worlds underfoot.

Last Updated: Feb 3 1995.

josullvn@cs.cmu.edu