Hotbed Of New Ideas
The Age
Tuesday June 16, 1998
LIKE A mother hen for the 21st century, Marc Norton, manager of RMIT University's new Ideas Incubator, has taken on a batch of the university's brightest students and their ideas for using multimedia.
An initial group of 20 are already working in the incubator's Carlton building, with 150 planned to develop ideas there over the next three years.
As part of the "I-Cubed" Interactive Information Institute at RMIT, the incubator is an attempt to let students make their imagined projects real, for commercial development or wider use.
Norton said a big advantage of the incubator was that students from any discipline could use their work on multimedia projects as part of their degree.
The incubator is not necessarily for computing students. "What we want to do is bring in students from across the faculties," Norton said. A mix of experienced post-graduates with idea-filled undergrads and, eventually, some industry influence, will bring the best results, Norton said.
Norton was initially a mathematician, then an IT consultant to Comalco and he most recently lectured at Wollongong University.
He first heard about the I-Cubed institute from its first director, Professor Peter Thomas, whom he knew in at Brunel University in London.
Norton thinks the development of multimedia has hardly begun: "I think it's got much further to go. I think we're the slime crawling out of the sea (in evolutionary terms)."
He's fascinated by the possibilities of mixing disciplines, and believes the real work of the incubator may not be in the student's initial projects, but in the software they come up with to solve problems along the way.
The students can use Silicon Graphics workstations, PowerMacs and an NT server to develop their work.
A Java Centre of Excellence is being set up with Sun workstations (these were sold to the incubator for $1) and the incubator is closely tied to a new broadband development studio, also part of I-Cubed.
The projects range from a weather simulator to a game that examines the stereotypes people hold, based on appearances.
Two projects from among several architecture students in the incubator aim to create different virtual environments on the Web.
Sean Chua, a final year student, is using the techniques of online games like Quake to develop ways of showing architectural plans over the Web that go beyond the currently available 3D renderings, which, he says, don't allow true walk-throughs.
Chua, who was webmaster on RMIT's architecture and design department website, says he was not interested in games until he realised the potential the "world-building" style software offered for architecture.
Among his philosophical influences he cites post-modern writer Italo Calvino and his book of fantastical cities, Invisible Cities.
Another final year student, David Harrap, is developing an online virtual environment called a "drop zone" using virtual reality modelling language with Java and HTML embedded in it.
The 3D site will change as users add information and topics, and users will navigate around the site's landscape in virtual space.
It would be used by architects and advanced computer users to trade information.
Harrap gave the example of a film maker wanting to simulate wind on Parliament House - they would put the query up on the site, perhaps creating a virtual building, then mathematicians could provide the formula for the simulation, and code writers could turn that into a simulation.
© 1998 The Age
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