Uzume
CAVE Application

2003

Roland Blach (DE)
Petra Gemeinböck (AT)
Nicolaj Kirisits (AT)

“Uzume,” named after a Japanese Shinto goddess, means “whirling.” The user is immersed into a highly sensitive reactive environment and experiences thereby the communicative faculties of a virtual counterpart.

This communication resembles the attempt to carry on a conversation with someone whose language one does not understand. Although the virtual environment reacts to the user’s slightest movement, it does develop independently to a certain degree and challenges the visitor to try to figure out its peculiar linguistic code.

The essence of “Uzume” is that the user is not in a position to be able to control this interactive world by means of technology. To a much greater extent, this tense interrelationship between reaction and independent behavior on the part of the virtual environment plays upon the technological illusion of control.

Uzume’s world is bound to the physical projection space of the CAVE and is based on the spatial representation of the temporal behavior of so-called “strange attractors.” When the visitor moves about within the projection space, he/she crosses the attractors’ parameter fields and thereby changes the respective state of their environment. Moreover, his/her presence triggers minute changes in Uzume’s medium, a force field in which both the user and the whirling structures are embedded.

“Uzume” was developed at CC Virtual Environments of the Fraunhofer IAO Stuttgart.