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Environmental awareness is a key step on the road to reversing the ecological impact of humans on the planet. The Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique decided to do its part to turn things around with an innovative approach. Using virtual technology, the school's students designed the Stepping Garden, a fun and innovative virtual forest where visitors can plant flowers and trees simply by walking along a path. As they walk, Dassault Systèmes' 3DVIA Virtools technology brings the forest to life with bright and colorful virtual plants.
Planting an interactive forest
In the Stepping Garden, visitors walk along a touch-sensitive path in front of a screen that displays a forest. Sensors beneath the path transmit signals generated by the visitors' steps to receptors installed behind the screen. The information is relayed via a Midi connection to 3DVIA Virtools, which dynamically and randomly generates images of trees and plants on the virtual screen, as if they are sprouting from the ground. Different musical sounds herald the arrival of each new plant.
Grégoire Cliquet, professor of real-time 3D interactivity, is in charge of the school's curriculum for interactive design. He proposed a class on human-computer interaction that teaches topics ranging from the design of services and the creation of virtual interfaces using Web standards such as XHTML/CSS/JS/PHP, to different authoring software, including 3DVIA Virtools. For Cliquet, 3DVIA Virtools addresses a wide range of uses, including immersive virtual reality, games and real-time 3D applications. "With Virtools, our students' imagination is limitless," Cliquet said. "Thanks to the software's power and user-friendly visual scripting language, they are able to quickly and easily prototype interactive real-time 3D applications like the Stepping Garden."
Cliquet believes that 3D is rapidly becoming an important part of modern life, mimicking the real world with surprising precision. "Our virtual reality program prepares our students to make the most of what technology has to offer to create innovative and fun applications. 3DVIA opens countless possibilities by breaking down the barriers between the real and virtual worlds," he concluded.
