Syzygy: Movies

• The movies are in Quicktime format and range in size from 5 to 15 MB.
• Movie 1: Early video showing Syzygy inside the ISL's 6-sided Cube, as run by a PC cluster.
• Movie 2: Video shown at IEEE VR 2003 demonstrating Syzygy's fault-tolerance, reliable operation, and high quality real-time graphics clustering. The neat thing is that this video shows a heterogeneous graphics cluster (Windows and Linux) which had no genlocking at all between computers. Even under these adverse circumstances, Syzygy does well.
• Movie 3: Syzygy was used for a number of experiments in teleimmersion during 2002. These are recorded, in chronological order, in this movie. First, the "magic mirror", where children put on motion capture gear and drove an avatar in a virtual environment. Next, excerpts from a long-distance collaborative dance performance, as chronicled in more depth in movies 6 and 7. Finally, a "tele-sport" where two motion-captured participants in different locations play a game together. This third segment is interesting in that it shows the motion capture environments in which the two "tele-sport" participants play, along with some real-time screen captures of what occurs in the virtual world.
• Movie 4: Presented at VRST 2003. Longer shots of the "tele-sport" from the last segment of movie 3. These are real-time screen captures from the virtual environment. The first three pictures along the web page sidebar show three perspectives on the experiment (virtual reality, participant 1, and participant 2). Inside the virtual environment, the participants push a ghostly blue torus back and forth across a playing field.
• Movie 5: Shows a collaborative dance performance between a motion-captured dancer in Illinois and a live dancer in Los Angeles, from 2002.
• Movie 6: A different perspective on the collaborative dance performance.
• Movie 7: Syzygy was used in a sequence of museum installations in 2003-2004 involving live dancers and motion capture technology. Instead of driving avatars, the dancer's motions drove "abstract information spaces". This movie shows what happened.
• Movie 8: Shows a prototype Syzygy collaboration environment. A group of students prototype a virtual dance party using a video wall powered by a heterogeneous collection of PCs. A work in progress. 2004.
• Movie 9: This movie demonstrates the scalability of peer-to-peer reality (aka Myriad). It shows a cluster visualization of a crowd of 300 avatars being driven by 60,000 messages per second.
• Movie 10: Shows a motion capture driven dance performance. "Dreaming Meat" uses similar technology to the museum installation in Movie 7.
• Movie 11: A virtual reality visualization done by the Mid-America Earthquake Center.
• Movie 12: CANVAS is a PC cluster CAVE installed in the UIUC's Krannert Art Museum.