The Mindstage project was produced by Paul Richens with Michael Nitsche as director and Jonathan Mackenzie as its software wizard. Its first stage was conducted at the Digital Studios (2003-2004) at the University of Cambridge. In August 2004 a prototype has been delivered.
Mindstage delivers a pre-recorded lecture inside a virtual lecture space. A virtual three-dimensional space was created specially as a performance space for the selected lecture. The topic of the talk defines the environment and the spatial arrangement of its illustrative elements and the argument of the talk drives the design of the space. A pre-coded lecturer avatar guides students through the virtual world, moving from one object/ illustration/ film clip to another while delivering the lecture.
The lecture chosen for the prototype is the Film Design: Illusion and Practice lecture on film design delivered by the award-winning film designer Christopher Hobbs. The lecture is richly illustrated with film clips and production stills.
Comparable to a 'Memory Palace' Mindstage creates spatial mirrorworlds of the lecturer's line of thoughts. Certain rooms contain ingredients of certain logical arguments, proofs, or scientific enigmas the speaker mentions during the talk. The speaker explores this themed virtual world and its ingredients parallel to the unfolding of the logical argument. The lecture is not treated solely as an information delivery to students but also as a narrative through the topic that has been translated into a spatial journey.
Various interactive features are available during the lecturer's linear presentation and the individual exploration of the Mindstage space: control over film clips, over 3D objects (elevators, 3D puzzles), and a text chat feature. In addition we experiment with tracing the spatial movement and the chat-behavior in the lecture space for evaluation purposes.
Mindstage was realized using the Virtools SDK; modelling was done in Discreet's 3D Studio Max 5 and Alias Maya 6. It runs on a consumer level PC or laptop but delivers the best performance on machines with a 128MB RAM graphic card and 1GB RAM.
Christopher Hobbs enthusiastically donated the content for the prototype. We were supported by the staff of the Cambridge University Moving Image Studio, especially Maureen Thomas. The project was funded from a generous grant from Informatix Inc of Tokyo.
