Visitors to the Bayou experienced cutting-edge VR applications that included several virtual renditions of the city of New Orleans. The LEGO Group's recreation of the Big Easy was built not only with the usual geometric primitives, but from virtual LEGO bricks. The virtual New Orleans in the LEGO environment contained many of the city's landmarks, including the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, a riverboat, and the Louisiana Superdome full of cheering fans. The LEGO Group is also working to create other virtual environments. The themes of its childrens' toys, such as outer space and underwater environs, are a first step, but the virtual environment also allows reaching beyond established genres.
Immersed in a head-mounted VR display and quadraphonic sound and manipulating the environment with dual data gloves, users can interact at several levels with the virtual LEGO environment. The environment includes automated behaviors such as the rotating paddle wheel of a riverboat and the snapping jaws of a LEGO crocodile. Users can move through the environment, changing scale to meander down a street or leap across town. Playful interaction with components is possible, for example by "grabbing" an airplane and "flying" it through the world.
The most powerful feature of the LEGO world is the ability to manipulate the individual bricks that make up the model, thereby changing or adding to the world. There are several thousand varieties of LEGO bricks, and the LEGO Group is working on modeling them all in digital form. However, even a few hundred brick types are more than enough to build a fascinating world. Users can select bricks from a menu inside the environment and add them to the virtual model, with the software positioning them exactly as they would snap together in the real world.
While the result of these digital efforts is, hopefully, child's play, the technology behind it is not. The demonstration system pushes the limits of both hardware and software. The LEGO Group developed close relationships with software vendor Multigen, Inc. and workstation manufacturer Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). Both companies have put extra effort into their support since the demands of the LEGO environment provide excellent tests of their products.
Running on multiprocessor SGI workstations, 10-20 frames per second are typical.
Only off the shelf software is used to create the environment. Multigen's Smart Scene provides the framework for the virtual world, the interface to it, and the ability to add behaviors to its elements. While the software is not customized per se, it is continually being tuned to provide better accuracy, higher performance, and more intuitive and powerful models of interaction.
The LEGO environment's requirements are demanding enough to drive the development of software that will be useful for a broad spectrum of VR applications. Of particular concern to the LEGO application is accuracy in global positioning. The LEGO bricks in the virtual world must fit together exactly across a large virtual space, pushing the tolerances of the software. The rules for how any two of several thousand shapes are allowed to fit together are also complicated.
An additional area of concern is managing the complexity of the models. To the user, the New Orleans model appears to be constructed of individual bricks. In reality, much of the visual complexity is achieved through texture mapping; for example, a single wall composed of hundreds of "bricks" can be represented by a single texture map instead of modeling each brick separately. The actual New Orleans model would contain several million virtual LEGO bricks, beyond the current capabilities of even high-end real-time graphics systems. Research continues into automated conversion between these representations, so that if a user adds to or dismantles part of the model, the individual virtual bricks will behave correctly. (Dynamic LOD comment?)
The LEGO Group's approach to creating toys includes basic "rules of play" which guide their efforts: a focus on creating instead of merely playing with objects; total modularity; and an infinite playscape with limitless possibilities. These rules continue to apply in a virtual play environment.
The next step for the system is a shared environment in which multiple participants can create models. This raises a host of technical issues such as synchronization that are common problems in VR. But more importantly, what are the ethics of a shared play environment? Can users take apart the creations of others? Unlike the real world, at least there are an infinite number of LEGO bricks available for use.
LEGO expects their foray into digital technology to be beneficial in a number of ways. Within the company, design, manufacture, packaging, creation of model instructions for toy sets, and promotional efforts will all benefit from a shared capability to accurately represent and render LEGO models. For the public, an interactive adventure featuring photorealistic rendering is in the making, as is a CAD-like modeling package for building LEGO models. In the future, there is the possibility of film projects - perhaps a "Toy Story" where everything is built of toys? Computer graphics enable a wealth of possibilities.
What is LEGO's ultimate aspiration for their virtual environment? "Real time is real fun", says Dent-de-Lion ("Dandi") du Midi, head of LEGO Research and Development. While the technology is not yet ready for mass consumption, the LEGO Group's approach is to push the limits now and "let things happen later". Demanding applications such as this will continually inspire technological advances. When it is no longer "work" to use the technology and the technological concerns can fade into the background, the LEGO Group's goal of providing a new level of play will be realized.
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