To a behavioural Design,
an other perspective for the 3D perspective of image synthesis
to be immerse in new virtual worlds
and to settle in its proper life.
by Patrick Saint-Jean, CREACI at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, CRI
at the University Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France.
Summary
On the one hand, the evaluation of the results of a study relating the
2D expression on paper media of the 3D realisation of a fiction scenario,
undertaken by a French and Japanese population, and on the other hand,
the pupils or students evolution in situation of apprenticeship in view
to use the artistic creation for industrial purposes or educational purposes
in the technique, invites us at analyse the current situation where the
traditional representation methods or presentation did not suffice more
and where the new technologies fascinate but sufficiently frighten for
escaping or avoiding the passage to the act that implies sometimes a restructuration
but especially new methods of work.
Observing the imminence of the professional change, we pose the problem
of the teaching, of the objectives and risks of the numerical image and
tempt of evaluating solutions for the current and the future moment.
Introduction
To century of the planetary and spatial communications, the electronics
has opened new ways, and has pushed us to a more specific thought on the
ergonomy of the human communication (communication human-machine but equally
between humans via the machines), for the general public as well as the
professionals with relationships that one and the other can have between
they by the educational factor that they imply.
The television and the revolution of the media
The photography, the cinema, the television and the trips have shaken
the world of Gutenberg, several centuries old (1451), where the printed
document supporting the speech, the memory and the communication by the
illustrated text, creates habits of reading, of writing and of action developed
around of the paper document. The increase of the information taken in
account, has provoked the publishing of documents superficial or simplified
for the general public, or very dense or overloaded for specialists. That
is often the case for industrial drawings where the leaf of paper, insufficient,
is replaced by a large file relating the different components.
But it remains true problems of communication on the one hand between
specialists of professions or of different know-how, and on the other hand
between a specialist and a non specialist that have to know the work for
speaking and doing making, to integrate specialities in more general projects
leading to the realisation and to the production. Such is the case of the
designer (stylistician) that is working with the engineer and the man of
marketing without, as for much, to be the specialist of these two last
domaines. It is the same for the great yards (construction, engineering,
spatial, cinema, and others) where all professions have to be taken separately
and together in the definition of the notebook of contraintes and of costs,
as well as in the idea and the conception, and until the production.
The teaching seeks to face this situation with a very generalized or
specialized program in the face of a general public population of all source
or pre-specialised. But the how communicate between specialities or between
a speciality and an external person to this speciality without that the
time of communication is spent for explain the containing more than the
content, stays a true problem.
If the book, the newspaper, the magazine and the paper document are
adapted to the reading, the four decades old new world of the animated
image and the audio-visual (perhaps the world of Mc Luhan), where the street
and the television upset the habits, provoke exchanges, incite both together
to mixes and to the identification of cultures, and favours the communication
by the image commented, proposing thus the understanding by the observation,
the look, the trip, the reporting, the realisation of a work or of self-even,
with or through others.
The numerical image, the multimedia, and the virtual reality bring
the solutions ; and the computer system becomes the unimedia ideal where
undertake necessary passages for the expression and to the co-ordination
of these different points of view : progressive passage and "continuous"
of the objective to the subjective, the quantitative to the qualitative,
the simple to the complex, the rigidity to the suppleness, an aesthetics
to an other, an ethic to an other, a behavior to an other.
The digital and the revolution of the multimedia
The parallel evolution of the computer and of the computer systems,
from the centre of calculation to the personal computer well equipped,
has made to discover or to emerge a new world : this one of the numerical
Virtual, the central or the peripheral memory (electronics, magnetic, magneto-optic,
or optical), props of the coded number (not only passive data) allowing
the logical and arithmetical calculations as the visualisations on the
screen or the printings, provoking the automatisms, the conversationalism,
the programmation and the interactivity, the immersion in the visual environment,
the movements and gestures and even the multi-sensorial perceptions.
The intellectual can not therefore be contented by the writing, by
the reading and by the traditional and ancestral speech, since the fact
that on the one hand the users have a need increasingly great (time, quantity
and quality) for a better understanding, for a better showing and demonstration,
and on the other hand the audio-visual, the hypertext, the numerical multimedia
and hypermedia can allow of rendering better account, by the text, the
image, by the sound and the movement, of the messages that we want to communicate
to a maximum of persons (and non only to initiate), and especially of problems,
always more complex, than we try to approach, to understand and to solve.
Whole this changes deeply our acquired, in our methods of understanding
and our modes of expression, that integrate increasingly components, and
consequently are changing our own mental.
To the duality concrete-abstract putting in before what is perceptible
by our senses and conceptualisable by our spirit - having elsewhere provoked
the social split technicians-intellectuals -, the numerical puts in obviousness
the importance of the Virtual linked to the simulation, to the imaginary,
to the inductive in more of the deductive. And the projection to be thought
it and acted, on the support numerical and logistics, re-establishs the
balance concrete-abstract, whole as the balance educational sciences-letters
allowing to insure the research and the development by the experimentation
in workshops of the concrete (workshop of the traditional artist, technical
laboratory where are treaties by the action and the perception of objectivated
entities as real), in workshops of the Virtual (spaces of numerical information,
programmable central memory visualised on the interactive screen or peripheral
memories of the computer, where are stocked and treated all what the coding
and the symbolism render potential, not necessary possibly real but sensitively
possible then virtual), and in workshops of the concept (library, table
of the writer and the seeker where one processes the idea and the concept).
But the workshop of the Virtual puts increasingly easily in the workshop
of the concrete and on the table of the writer and favors the projections
of same and physical order non-mystic metaphysical and why not spiritual.
The numerical Virtual becomes all simply a common place. Then why not to
exploit it fully in the education and the professional, without for as
much to eliminate neither the diversity neither the reality of the concrete
by a modelization simplified told "easier", and the abstract
by a manipulation in great number of the containers of the concept more
or less independently of its contents. Indeed the Virtual is only a mental
image stimulation of the concrete and the abstract often richer that the
synthetic and the artificial. But it becomes gradually and massively a
generator of images simulating the concrete and the traditional abstract
and equally a inconceivable or impracticable generator of new images to
a given moment but being able to project the future and consequently influencing
strongly the achievable and the conceivable. The numerical Virtual is not
therefore only the potential field expression but equally fields of influence
that necessary is well for us to know to better use them.
The realisation 3D on support 2D of the child to the
adult
SigKids, Siggraph 94
A study on the role of the graphic representation in the modelization
of the physical space, by a comparative approach (2) of the system of representation
initial with constants and variable study in the resolution of figurative
problems has attracted our attention on the suitable followings :
-
The French and Japaneses have not the same behavior in the face of the
3D representation on 2D support, a scenario describing a scene of all days
including characters and objects in the space ;
-
the study is made on the two populations with analyses on 100 individuals
by slice of age ;
-
a tendency shows that Japaneses adhere to 3D earlier of 2 years by report
to the French, but necessarily in using the linear perspective (oblique
with point of escape) ;
-
Japaneses, more precocious, begin the 3D representation to 8 years old;
-
Japaneses are very numerous to make a 2D representation of 3D but rather
in 2.5 D, it is to tell in taking into account the thickness of objects
then of the oblique then of the "cavalière" perspective
(utilisation of oblique parallels ) and the linear perspective but of manner
heterogeneous ;
-
to 9 years old, 20% of Japaneses use oblique for 6% of the French ;
-
the representation by the oblique is 80% at Japanese adults, and 2.5 D
is neighbour 60% at these same adults (compounds instructors, bac + 2 and
more) ;
-
the linear perspective is correct to Japan in small number (4%) to 10 years
and 11 years at the French ;
-
the 2D representation (projection to flat) fall very rapidly to Japan;
it is used only to 30% by adults ;
-
in Japan the growth of the 3D representation in perspective linear begins
to 13 years to pass 12% to 17 years and to reach until 17% at adults (instructors)
;
-
the maximum of the growth of the representation in perspective linear in
France is reached to 17 years (8%), and decreases to 5% at adults (population
of instructors, bac + 2 and more).
Evoked reasons of such differences are :
-
the processing of the space to Japan,
-
the origami (paper folding 2D to make 3D objects) taught very early,
-
2 hours by artistic teaching week valorised,
-
the utilisation of the calligraphy,
-
the drawing and the handwriting make part a same mental process from the
young age, due to the fact that verbs "to write" and
"to
draw" in French be translate into the same word in Japanese,
-
the geometry is taught in sixth form in Japan and only in third form in
France,
-
the "cavalière" perspective is used in Japan very
early and massively.
These reasons are expressed with regard to Japan as world producer of technology.
While the teaching in France has to face a lack of teachers on the subject
adapted to the new know-how, and especially to a lack of need to make.
The opposition intellectual-manual of the 70s and 80s years and the depreciation
of the manual by lack of practice, has made the France a country that is
no longer considered by the financiers as a country producer of technique.
In fact, that can change, because, if the world of the concrete becomes
"too
slow" to the apprenticeship of the technique to seduce arriving
generations, the numerical Virtual can second it efficiently. More intellectual
countries can then virtualise this that more "poor people countries"
can concretise massively manner less expensive, provided that the passage
of one to the other is facilitated, meanwhile that a better world dividing
up of work become more human and balanced.
We find indeed these results in the practice of the teaching computer
arts in applied arts (slice of 20 age to 25 years old) where the one observes
in more than :
-
pupils having a thorough traditional artistic practice and more marked
reject the utilisation of the computer tool or are in delay in its utilisation
for the representation 3D; but they can very rapidly to adapt there from
that they in have need and the will and that the utilisation in is facilitated
;
-
in the superior teaching, the middle scholastic seems more in delay that
the university middle that, by its number provides more students volunteers
and diversified ;
-
this very asserted delay in the beginning of years 90 seems to lessen with
the mediatic impact and visual fallout (films, advertisements, video-clips)
showing the interest of a side and the impossible impasse of the other
;
-
women seem to have more pain to manage 3D that men and are more prone to
be attended to the packaging (2D plate on a volume more or less complex);
but when they want they do and the computer tool seems to fulfil this difference
;
-
the entry to Superior Normal School of Cachan in Art and Creation Manufacturer
has been made after two years of preparation to a contest understanding
a test centered around the industrial drawing ; one observes that pupils
appearing there find increasingly difficulties (even to the simple descriptive
or functional reading) and do not find in their studies need of this representation;
what has brought to make evolve this test to a work centred on the volumic
representation for purposes design (stylic), leaving the technical aspect
"to
others"; but this solution, indeed necessary, pose nevertheless
the problem of the visual communication between professional.
To 15 th century all scientists could join together because numerous bit
and connoisseurs of whole for the period ; to 19 th century the impossibility
to meet becomes permanent due to specialisation ; currently the computer
and telecommunications tempt again to favor the meeting. The risk of non
communication would be great if the tool data-processing, common place
to the artist and to the technician, did not come to compensate this double
incompetence : the technician to present to the artist a too loaded plan
(multiple lines coded in multicouche and quotations in great number) to
make emerge a form with its clean liberty degrees to the creation (problem
of the deformed form including a mechanism), and the artist to present
to the technician of forms too complex or too skimped to allow the emergence
of a mechanical functionality, electrical or electronic (problem of the
Aborigine to five unmarketable paws for integrating in a form).
The correspondence 2D and 3D (with texture, transparency, lighting
and interactive manipulation) on simple even computer system, with layers
or masks allow or have to allow to visualise the useful information (image
2D or 3D, quotation, quantification) to process technical problems and
artistic problems together in the Design.
If the new method teaching is not a pedagogical problem but a financial
or more a decisional problem to solve problems of equipment, training of
masters accustomed to others methods, and recovery of the delay accumulated
by report to the other countries, it becomes more problematical when it
becomes professional because, as for the mechanics, the equipment has to
be industrial at least in these principles. Method gold of work are not
again stabilised, high equipment fault level, financing, training of the
personnel and especially organisation of the chains and workshops of realisation
and production of products finished. In effect if the computer tool integrates
in parallel to methods traditional, for needs of maquettage, memorisation
of models for purposes of adjustment, modification or archival, in replacement
more rapid and less expensive of classic methods, it will be necessary
to wait or to provoke a plug of conscience greater of the computer entity
with all its specificities, to integrate it totally all along the chain
of information in the course of the idea, the simulation, the production,
the installation on site, the utilisation or the analysis of the consumption
by the client and the recycling.
The Market : a driving risk of intelligence and
reflection to do not lack to advance without destroying
Soon, analysing industry of leisure's (games, culture, information,
tourism, hobby) to Japan, K. William, the Division company, specialist
of the virtual reality estimated, in October 1994, in its statement to
the first conference on the potential reality to Geneva, financed by Swiss
banks :
-
to 377 000 Millions of Swiss Frs. for the market around the "video
amusement"
-
to 93 000 Millions of Swiss Frs. for the market around the tourism,
-
to 83 000 Millions of Swiss Frs. for industry of the hobbies.
This under way establishment market to USA arrives in Europe and in France
inescapably and increase exponentialy. It puts problems, just as for the
language technique, that the container (words, objects) transports the
content (the language, the style, the aesthetics, the culture). Games in
are already premises. And if there is no manufacture (or adaptation), utilisation
and personalised local development, consumers and the street will impregnate
strongly with the other cultures, burying cultures and the local patrimony
sources of intellectual wealth (knowledge, and know-how) and social intelligence
(reflection from several points of view). That is true for Europe is true
for all country (in and between) and the market need specific things for
specific people to stay rich : one thing for everybody make profit immediatly
but destroy the market (sale at a loss by no-respect of the specific taste,
less differentiated creations and events by uniform taste).
On the other hand, the new technology welcome, even if they are required
by leisure's, has very rapidly to be followed by a recovery before consumption,
in the idea and the realisation of tools and polyagogic instruments, it
is to tell capable to form at the same time to several disciplines in facilitating
passages and comparisons. Then the representations and presentations of
concepts and realisations potentials can be expressed by the numerical
image (or more globally in the numerical Virtual) gradually but especially
according to different modes adapted to bodies of trades specialised.
Evolving thus, gradually of the artistic sketch to the plan of production,
in pass by technical diagrams, the organigram and notebook of marketing
and manufacture costs, plans of realisation models and small series, simulations
of manufacture, utilisation and recycling, specialised trade bodies create
a generalist chain of virtual production where all intervention and modification
remain possible. The whole organised from a basis on data, the interactive
multimedia representation is then rendered adaptive and commutative.
The notion of "polyagogy" was introduced by Iannis
Xénakis to baptise the first interactive systems for the visual
and musical composition, that we had conceived on minicomputer, between
years 1974 to 78, at the Centre of Study of Mathematical and Automatic
Musical (UPIC: Polyagogic Computing Unit of the CEMAMU). The system put
in before the possibility to learn together the applied mathematics, the
drawing, the music, the architecture (the matter, materials, structures
and functions) and the plasticity (of forms and colours) of the micro composition
of the sound and the image to the macro composition of the musical and
visual work.
To the market of the leisure attaches the market of the education,
the culture and the information in pass by educate leisure's (15 to 20%
of education in the game to stimulate the research of excitation by the
suspense, the rapid action, the reflex) and the education by the game (15
to 20% of game in the education to stimulate the research of information
by the experience, the reflection, the strategy, the immediate performance
being secondary but stimulant to exceed self-even, or simply reactivate
the training), so on the plan concerned numerical products that instruments
allowing their utilisation's, surety to new needs and provoking new arts
and trades.
A Cybernetics by interactive and feedback process integrating
the Virtual
The economic cycle evolving the trilogy to produce-consumer-recycle,
it is necessary to anticipate from the idea the totality of the process
and in to insure its optimum development. If the production in great quantity
of same products, seems to excel actually, its impact on the unemployment,
on the cultural wealth impoverishment linked to the variety, to the difference
from points of view, to the personality and to the originality, provokes
a contradiction, that has to evolve to the conceivable, the programmable,
the personnalisable by the integration of the Virtual in its process :
1 - Presentation of concepts (ideas, objectives, storyboard, sketches,
scenario).
2 - Plans of organisation, idea, realisation and marketing (design),
utilisation of elements 2D of libraries multimedia of the trade or personnel's
providing element meadow synthesised, or virtualised (digitalisation of
the sound, the image, the volume and the film with processing meadow for
its utilisation in the numerical Virtual).
3 - Meadow-model concrete (if need is), for the appreciation of the
concrete or the realisation of virtualisable objects (2D or 3D or animation).
4 - Virtual representation by plans and visualisations of the realisation
of the model-object and the model-environment in the numerical Virtual
(utilisation and modelling or deconstruction-construction elements of libraries
multimedia of the trade or personnel's, integration of the video-numerical
environments).
5 - Simulation by visualisation: presentation of concepts, representation
the model-alone object or in the model-environment (placement in situation,
animation).
6 - Interactive simulation : manipulation of the model-object in the
model-environment (staging in the Virtual).
7 - Putting in virtual live with interactive simulation in immersion
: to live with the model-object in the model-environment, worlding and
sound-waving for the telepresense of the work in system, (passage of the
state of observer to the state of actor, traveller, explorer, scientist
in and by the virtual reality and the virtual worlds), ergonomy of the
manufacture and the utilisation, "ergogenology" (research
and study of sources of work linked to the manufacture or to the utilisation
of the objects), setting for manufacture and removing for maintenance,
repair and recycling.
8 - Feedback to 1, 2 and 4 for modification.
9 - Concrete model (if need be).
10 - Plans of execution.
11 - Concretisation for identification and authentification by the
realisation in small series.
12 - Tests with feedback to 1, 2 and 4 if necessary.
13 - Manufacture in great series.
14 - Marketing with visual communication.
15 - Maintenance of the consumption (information, advertisment, service
after sale).
16 - Reorientation and feedback to 13.
with in parallel feedback :
17 - Analysis of the consumption for return in 1 for purposes of modification
or idea of new products.
18 - Analysis of the Design, realisation and manufacture tools and
feedback to 1 to make evolve methods.
19 - Analysis and interactive training by the simulation to strengthen
sensory-motive and conceptual abilities.
Remark on the cybernetics process:
-
The essential objective can express in the form slogan : "With
the data-processing, remain simple, but make complex without making complicated".
-
This process allows a parallelism and the more numerous feedbacks of the
tasks (analysis, processing and synthesis of the information multimedia,
even to distance) with an interactivity between tasks insuring the convergence
of the corrections and modifications to objectives of quality.
-
The Virtual Reality is currently in addition to the model in the concrete
; the cost of a concrete model is tree more time than a simulation, but
the two are important and complementary as assistance with the decision
; of where an overcost but that, in the time with the experience and the
memorisation, will be able to evolve in parallel and could be optimised.
-
The visual work is insured by a visual communication (and telecommunication).
-
As the photography has rendered obsolete the realism pictorial to make
it to evolve to the abstract or the non realism and the hyperrealisme,
the arrival of the numerical and especially of the digitalisation (or virtualisation)
2D and 3D or 4D for the lively (capture motion), evolve the practice and
the praxis : why to draw a complex thing when it is possible to acquire
a modifiable model. In industry and in the professional domain other that
artistic or artisanal, the drawing has therefore to serve to sketch, to
schematise, to notice, to "scribble", then in choosing
in libraries what in nears the most, to modify, adapt, and fashion. These
libraries, modularised objects to the materials and plywood matters, against-moulds,
against-formed, projected, documented, computer-engraving, computer-silk-screen
process, computer-sculpted in great number, allow or allow to induce evolution
in the methods, as for the loan for carry, to commercialise and to use
the products for the loan for plate, the loan for cast, the loan for form,
the loan to modify, the loan for manufacture, the loan for use and the
loan for put in stage in the Virtual.
-
The authors and the "lookers" of the numerical Virtual
just as of the photography and the cinema in the beginning have put several
decades to understand and know that the one could communicate, in to pull
the senses and to tell some thing.
-
This cybernetics applied in the production as in the teaching the production
and the industrial creation tends to reduce times apprenticeship of resemblance's,
sameness, identities, for to deepen the knowledge and the specificity of
differences and to favor the adaptability and the creativity.
The constraint of the art and the art of the constraint