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As the Crow Flies
Body and imagination make for powerful constraint systems. How do you become a
crow? Chris Milk's answer was a large-scale video triptych called The Treachery of Sanc-
tuary (2012) using Kinect and laser technologies. You see yourself in the panels: in the
fi rst, your real-time body image dissolves into a fl ock of crows; in the second, the crows
attack you; and in the third, the crow's luscious wings are mapped onto your arms. The
piece shows these transformations as if you were looking at yourself in a mirror.
But what if you want to become embodied as a crow who could fl y? Here's a pretty
gnarly design example that stands the test of time, I think. I include it because of the
several interrelated “interface” problems that had to be solved in order to create an
embodied affordance for fl ight.
One of the features of the Placeholder Virtual Reality project (1993) was the ability
of interactors to assume the bodies of animals. In fact, the only way you could have a
body in Placeholder would be to put on one of the “smart costumes” for spider, fi sh,
snake, or crow. You would arrive body-less in a cave, with petroglyphs of these crea-
tures trying to get your attention by calling to you and describing their fi ne qualities.
As you approached a petroglyph, its voice would become louder, encouraging you
to “put your head in it.” As soon as you did so, you would take on the shape of that
petroglyph-animal, including some of its sensory-motor characteristics.
I set about designing how a crow could move by asking people how they fl ew in
their dreams. This was a mistake.
Three versions of dream fl ight: the airfoil, the superman pump, and the
swimming-in-air model.
In the system, each person had a head-mounted VR display with a sensor on
it for head tracking, a torso sensor for body tracking, and two “grippees”—these
were little strips of plastic that, when fl exed, could give an approximation of hand
movement. Earlier systems had been “single-handed” with datagloves. We knew
(continues)
 
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