Untitled - witz cultural

Figure34. Text in a Virtual Reality Environment: Screen by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover,and Josh Carroll. This photograph ofa session in the Brown University Cave environment shows a reader after the text has begunto cascade offthe walls. In the original photograph the letters appear in light blue and green while the heap directly in front of thereader is white. (Used by permission of Noah Wardrip-Fruin.)Using a mouse the reader flies into images of body parts taken from the famousanatomy book, and as one approaches more closely, texts appear.The illusion of immersing oneself in the poem leads to Wardrip-Fruin'slater projects in the Virrual Reality Cave at Brown University, where he workedwith Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, and Josh Carroll tocreate poetry in a more complete immersive environment.l8 In their Screen,the reader-viewer (immerseel) dons headtracker goggles and a VR glove,which allows the system to track her position and movement, and then entersthe three-sided space whose white walls three projectors cover with textrather than images or, rather, with texts as images (Figure 34). As the introductionto the Iowa ReviewWeb interview points out, "This experience in virtualreality is very different from the Holodeck vision of total immersion in a