In the ongoing series of articles and letters about the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center’s role on campus, I think a key idea has been missed. EMPAC, coupled with other things going on at RPI, is an amazing opportunity for some truly creative research—research that would not be possible anywhere else. I recently came to RPI after many years at another campus, and part of what drew me here was the exciting potential of campus resources, particularly EMPAC and the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovation. One of President Shirley Ann Jackson’s stated goals for these is a coupling of the two—think of it as one of the world’s fastest computers coupled with the world’s largest display. Where others are thinking about “virtual reality” as seeing Second Life on your laptop screen, I like to think of the “real virtuality” that EMPAC makes possible. With the capabilities that can be realized in that space, we can look at creating a virtual space where your emergence isn’t through a pair of 3-D glasses, but through what you see, hear, and feel.

At EMPAC, we can use theater technologies to vary the light, the sound, and the layout of spaces people are interacting in. As we learn to understand more about how to interact with such a combination of real and virtual worlds, the opportunity is manifest for projects that will let us interact, at a human scale, with things that are too small for us to see, such as molecular models; things that have no physical existence but affect our lives daily, such as information and data; things we have yet to imagine as we look at how our first and Second Lives can come together.

However, I want to stress that this is not easy to do. For example, supercomputers have not been used in interactive environments in the past, and it will take major breakthroughs in the computing sciences to figure out how to use the capabilities of CCNI to create and drive the real virtuality environments we can imagine. It will take innovations in engineering to figure out how to turn the virtual models into realities that affect our physical senses in appropriate ways. It will take new social and cognitive science to figure out how the interactions of multiple people, working together in both the same physical and virtual environment, can be modeled or enhanced. In short, the capabilities of EMPAC are way beyond the benefit, and it is a real benefit, of having a great performance space on our campus—it opens up whole new worlds of science and engineering for those of us at Rensselaer.

The search is now on for the right person to be EMPAC’s research director. The goal is to find someone who can articulate visions like the above and figure out how RPI students will be able to make them come true. I, and many of the other constellation professors and research faculty, look forward to working in this environment and with the new research director. With the capabilities of EMPAC, the resources of the CCNI, and a campus full of great students, this really will be a place where we can, as our slogan says, change the world.

Jim Hendler

Senior Professor

Tetherless World Constellation