In the early 1900s, particularly in the 1920s,African-American literature, art, music,

dance, and social commentary began to flourish inHarlem, a section of New York City. This African-American cultural movement became known as The NewNegro Movement and later as the Harlem Renaissance.The Harlem Renaissance transformed African-Americanidentity and history, but it also transformed Americanculture in general. Never before had so many Americansread the thoughts of African-Americans and embracedtheir African-American community’s productions, expres-sions, and style.

We wanted to convey the importance of this move-ment to students. We thereforedeveloped Virtual Harlem,1 a col-laborative virtual reality (VR) tourof Harlem in which participants cantravel back 80 years to see and hearhistorical figures, speeches, andmusic from that period. Wedesigned it to help students experi-ence the neighborhood’s life andculture on both visual and criticallevels. (For a description of what it’slike to be immersed in VirtualHarlem, see the sidebar “VirtualHarlem Experience.”)

DevelopmentBryan Carter originally conceived the Virtual Harlem

project in 1998 at Central Missouri State University. Heinitiated the first prototype with Bill Plummer at theAdvanced Technology Center at the University of Mis-souri. This version was shown at Siggraph 1999.2 A yearlater, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) atthe University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) translated theHarlem experience to a fully immersive environment—the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE).

We built this new version of Virtual Harlem on top ofa high-level VR scripting framework called Yggdrasil.3

Yggdrasil is written in C++, on top of SGI’s Iris Performergraphics library, CAVElib VR library, and the Cavern-Soft G2 networking and collaboration library.4 It’sfocused on building the behaviors of virtual objects from

reusable components and on sharing an environment’sstate through a distributed scene graph mechanism.Yggdrasil constructs dynamic and interactive virtualworlds, so in addition to the basic graphical data used in

0272-1716/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE

Computer Graphics Art History and Archaeology

2 September/October 2002

Virtual Harlem is a learning

environment that lets

students experience the

Harlem Renaissance of the

1920s and 1930s as a

cultural field trip.

Andrew Johnson and Jason LeighUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

Bryan CarterCentral Missouri State University

Jim Sosnoski and Steve JonesUniversity of Illinois at ChicagoVirtual Harlem

Virtual Harlem ExperienceAs you step onto the streets of Virtual Harlem, a

trolley car full of people passes by, movingthrough a street filled with Model-Ts. Straightahead, the Lafayette Theater is an obviousattraction, with an all-black cast playing in theversion of Macbeth produced by Orson Welles. Youcan hear the sounds of dogs barking in the streetand people laughing and walking by. Taking thetrolley and getting off at the LaFayette stop (FigureA), you can hear a portion of Macbeth’s infamousmonologue as he holds his bloody dagger, whilethe cast practices during the day.

Taking the trolley is the fastest way to get aroundHarlem, but walking will take you into the clubs towatch live performances of jazz, blues, ragtime,and classical music. The Bamboo Inn, home of jazzimprovisation, and the Corner Bar, which was aninterracial club, are among the many establish-ments and visible landmarks. Walking through thestreets by day, you notice the entrepreneurial life ofthe city streets. You can pass street vendors sellingtheir wares, and as you approach one, he will startto call out his jingle, “the meat pie man is a mightyfine man.” These jingles or street chants were apopular form of entertainment and are the originof the commercial jingle. Walking also lets youexplore Harlem’s alleyways, where you mighthappen upon two men playing checkers or tellinghoodoo stories (the US version of voodoo) andinvolve the sharing of herbal recipes, love potions,trickster tales, or other kinds of spiritualisms. Asstudents hear these stories, the instructor can tellthem of the history of hoodoo as a kind of folkloredeveloped by slaves to accommodate their newsurroundings.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 3

You can also pass the Peace Mission of Father Divine, acult figure who was enormously popular on the EasternSeaboard and the West Coast for more than five years. Asyou pass, you can hear Father Divine describing himself asthe “Lord God in bodily form” as the followers cry out,“peace be to Father Divine.” Nearby is the largest African-American church of the time—Abyssinia Baptist Church—where you can hear the Reverend Adam Clayton Powelldeliver a portion of the Creation sermon as recorded by thepoet James Weldon Johnson.

But the most exciting time to be in Harlem is at night,and students (or teachers) may choose when night will fallin Harlem, after they have had enough of the daytimesights. At night, the city comes alive with the flashing lightsof marquees and the faint glow of the lampposts. Youmight choose where to go by reading the bills posted onbillboards outside the bars, which we created fromphotographs of actual bills of the time period. You mightinstead stroll the streets, peering in windows to decidewhat interests you most. At the Nest Club, waiters aresetting up for a fancy dinner, while across the street, peopleare eating at a more casual doughnut shop. Passing oneclub, you can hear Bill “Bojangles” Robinson tap dancinginside and reminiscing about the time that he tapped fivemiles down Broadway on his 60th birthday followed bymore than 500 well wishers.

What most people want to experience, however, isHarlem’s famous Cotton Club, where African-Americanscouldn’t enter as patrons. The gold- and wood-crafteddoors of this club are unmistakable, and as they open, youhave a sense of entering a world of wealth, exoticism,sensuality, and illusion (see Figure B). Designed to bereminiscent of old plantation life, the interior strikes you as acombination of the Old South and an exotic island jungle.There are palm trees everywhere, and the room is filled withlaughing guests in evening gowns and tuxedos. If you staylong enough, the curtains will part, and actual footage of afilmed performance of the Duke Ellington Band will play onstage as dancers tap in the foreground as an introduction tosinger Freddie Washington.

Virtual Harlem is an experiment in urban archaeology. Weplotted out the surface of historical Harlem and created animmersive world from its topography. At various locationswe dug deeper into its history to obtain a closer look at the

development. While some buildings are no more thanfacades to mark the space they occupied at a particularmoment in history, we can explore others in more detail. Asthe project develops, you will be able to visit the Hot ChaClub where Billie Holiday got her start, or the famous SavoyBallroom where dances like the Charleston and the LindyHop were popularized. Tonight, the Chick Webb Orchestraand the Jimmy Lundsford Band are playing in the “Battle ofthe Bands,” an all-night concert that goes on until oneband quits or the sun comes up. You can stay and listen, orjust watch dancers perform the Lindy Hop or the Jitter Bug.Small’s Paradise is nearby, where Langston Hughesfrequently visited. Meanwhile, down the street, MyraJohnson is singing at the Apollo Theater as part of amateurnight. What’s fascinating to show about the clubs in Harlemis the diversity of the clientele, from the “all-white” CottonClub to the interracial men’s club called Barron’s Cabaret orthe predominantly gay and lesbian audience of Edmund’sCellar.

A Virtual Harlem is a reconstruc-tion of 10 square blocks ofHarlem, New York in the 1920sand 1930s. Visitors can eitherwalk or take a trolley around thearea.

B Visitors to Virtual Harlem can walk inside the famous CottonClub.

Performer, its scene graph nodes can have behaviorsattached to them.

Another major enhancement we made to VirtualHarlem is the inclusion of an annotation tool. Annota-tions are typically used to highlight sections of text andmake interpretive remarks to aid memory. We can sim-ilarly use annotations in a virtual world to highlightareas or events of interest that occur within the envi-ronment, letting students or instructors leave retriev-able annotations throughout the virtual space.

Virtual annotations are recordings in VR that capturepeople’s hand and head gestures, as well as their voices.When the annotations are played back, an avatarappears in the virtual world to reenact the annotation.5

All virtual annotations are saved in a persistent data-base server with headers that include the author’s name,annotations name, time and date the annotation wasleft, and the location of the annotation in the virtualenvironment (VE). Thus, it lets users query the list ofannotations by author name, region, or date.

In our current application, we place 3D avatar mod-els in the VE to show the annotation’s location andauthor. Users can listen to the annotations by placingtheir virtual hand close to this annotation marker. Theycan stop a virtual annotation any time while it’s playing,or the playing of the annotation can fade out as usersmoves further away from it (see Figure 1). Users canrecord a new annotation anywhere in the VE, but onlythe annotation owner can remove it.

We showed this version of Virtual Harlem at I-Grid2000 in a collaborative session between a CAVE in Yoko-hama, Japan; the Advanced Technology Center in Mis-souri; and a CAVE in Chicago. Students in Jim Hall’sAfrican-American Studies class at UIC acted as remotevirtual tour guides for visitors to the CAVE in Yokohama,who asked them questions about the Harlem Renais-sance. In late October 2000, the MOBE (MarketingOpportunities for Black Entrepreneurs) group ofAfrican-American business persons, whose convention

was in Chicago, held their conference opening recep-tion at UIC to view Virtual Harlem.

Because Virtual Harlem is a large space and annota-tions can be left anywhere, we needed to create a toolto locate particular annotations—perhaps all the anno-tations left on a certain day, or left by a certain user, orleft in the neighborhood of a particular place. We havefound, over the past decade of developing CAVE appli-cations, that 3D virtual menus are extremely difficult tooperate for novice users, as it takes a high degree of dex-terity to select menu items in 3D. For Virtual Harlem wechose to use a personal digital assistant (PDA) with awireless local access network (LAN) connection to theCAVE—currently an iPaq Pocket PC.

The PDA provides two ways to access the annotations.First, it provides a list of all the annotations. Second, itprovides a map of Harlem and the location of all theannotations. The list view lets students (or teachers)access the annotations by name, creator, or date/time.The map view provides feedback on where students arecurrently standing in Virtual Harlem and their locationrelative to the various annotations. Students who areproficient in navigating in the virtual space can use theCAVE’s wand to move around. Alternatively, studentswho are less skilled in navigation can click on one of theannotations on the PDA screen and they’ll be automat-ically shuttled to the annotation where it will begin toplay (see Figure 2).

Because a CAVE is expensive, we wanted to provide amore economical way of experiencing Virtual Harlemwithout sacrificing the experience. As all the componentsof Virtual Harlem can run on a Linux machine as well asan SGI machine, we next ported Virtual Harlem to theAGAVE (Access Grid Augmented Virtual Environment,pronounced ah-gah-vay). The AGAVE6 provides passivepolarized stereoscopic 3D graphics using low-cost pro-jectors. Students wear inexpensive polarized 3D movieglasses to view the immersive content. We can incorpo-rate an additional 3D tracking system and pointing device

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4 September/October 2002

1 When a live tour guide isn’t available to take visitors through Virtual Harlem, those visitors can walk through thestreets and play prerecorded annotations. (a) Bryan Carter and Janice Lively rehearsing before recording an anno-tation in the CAVE. (b) An avatar appears on the street to reenact one of these annotations.

(a) (b)

to support 3D interaction or use a simple joystick ormouse. A complete AGAVE system without tracking costs$15,000 with an additional $10,000 if we use a goodtracking system. The AGAVE was designed to augmentthe Access Grid (a multisite videoconferencing platformdeveloped by Argonne National Laboratory) by lettingimmersive content be shared collaboratively over high-speed networks. (To learn more about Access Grid, visithttp://www.accessgrid.com.)

In spring 2001, Jennifer Brody from UIC’s African-American Studies department and Bryan Carter at Cen-tral Missouri State University coordinated their Englishliterature courses (The Harlem Renaissance at UIC andAfrican-American Literature at CMSU) about theHarlem Renaissance. The courses met at the same timeand the course syllabus and materials were sharedbetween the two classrooms. The students and instruc-tors interacted with each other through Polycom video-conferencing in the classroom, as well as in VirtualHarlem using the CAVE and the AGAVE (Figure 3). Moredetails about this experience can be found elsewhere.1,7

Learning about the Harlem RenaissanceA majority of colleges and universities around the

nation offer courses in African-American studies. Theseare usually taught as surveys, representing a broad timespan. Students who take courses in a number of depart-ments may be exposed to a correlative number of polit-ical movements, artists, historical events, andpersonalities. More often, students take only the cours-es in their own departments and thus miss significantaspects of African-American culture because of thelength of the period that must be covered within asemester. To compound this problem, students are usu-ally enrolled in large lectures and required to completean exhausting amount of reading during the semester.

With all these constraints, current instructional prac-tices often reinforce the passive learner mentality thatstudents learned in secondary school. The frustrationthat students sometimes have because of the way largesurvey classes are scheduled is increased when they’reasked to research on the Web and find the task dauntingeven if they have easy access to the Internet. For exam-

ple, there exist hundreds of search engines with links tosites pertaining to African-American culture—and adazzling number of Web-based resources may or maynot be valid from a research viewpoint. This can makestudents’ experience of the Harlem Renaissance dis-jointed and fragmented.

The goals of the Virtual Harlem project include thedevelopment of materials that incorporate advancedvisualization and interactivity techniques to facilitategreater comprehension by integrating and contextual-izing a period or a text. Instead of experiencing theHarlem Renaissance as a tangle of information, studentsexperience it as a kind of field trip to a cultural pastwhere various figures and artifacts fit into a setting asfamiliarly coherent as the settings of their daily lives. Byincorporating VR technology into their courses, projectmembers recreate the historical setting of the textsthey’re teaching. Hence, they can supplement thehumanities content with realistic images, music, speech-es, and so forth.

One of the primary reasons for incorporating VR in

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 5

2 While visitors tour Virtual Harlem they can see a map of the area andtheir current location on a handheld device. The device also shows thelocation and information about all the annotations, letting the visitorinstantly move to any place in Virtual Harlem and play the annotation there.

3 (a) Jennifer Brody’s Harlem Renaissance class at UIC interacts with Virtual Harlem on the AGAVE screen, and (b) Bryan Carter’sAfrican-American Literature class at Central Missouri State University through a Polycom videoconferencing system.

(a) (b)

humanities curricula is to engage students on a visualand critical level. Students can better understand andevaluate a historical movement like the Harlem Renais-sance within African-American culture when they enterinto a realistic simulation of the environment thatinspired the artists, educators, musicians, authors,politicians, and economists they’re studying. Throughsimulation, educators can encourage students to explorethe formation of multiple meanings from experience,effectively demonstrating the concept of the social con-struction of reality.8 The cross-disciplinary aspect of thisVR project encourages students to explore relationshipswithin a particular period even though independentlytaught courses in its music, art, literature, psychology,and history are their primary information sources.

Learning with Virtual HarlemWe believe that learning environments such as Vir-

tual Harlem provide settings wherein students have theopportunity to be both critical and creative. Studentscan walk down the streets of Harlem and see the shops,homes, theaters, churches, and businesses the writersof that period experienced in their daily lives. They canhear the music of the time, listen to political speechesof figures like Marcus Garvey, or enjoy a poetry readingby Langston Hughes. This experience augments thematerials that are available to the students in the formof books, photographs, audio recordings, or film. Unlikeconventional subject matter, Virtual Harlem is a localethat has to be experienced, albeit virtually, as if you werea tourist visiting Harlem via a time machine.

The quality of any tour is often based on the quality ofthe tour guide. If Bryan or another expert in the HarlemRenaissance is physically present, then he can lead agroup into the CAVE and take them on a tour of Harlempointing out the interesting features, meeting the vari-ous figures in the environment, making comments, andprompting for questions. If an expert isn’t present, but isavailable at a site with compatible hardware and a goodnetwork connection, then he or she can lead the samekind of tour as an avatar with a real-time audio connec-tion. Because experts aren’t always available, we’ve also

recorded Bryan and others (using the annotation sys-tem) talking and gesturing about the various importantlocations and people in the space. For the students’ firstexposure to the space, we prefer to use a live, in-persontour guide (preferably their course instructor) so thatthe students aren’t overwhelmed by the technology.However, first-time visitors are still often more engagedby the technology than by the content. It’s important togive the students multiple opportunities to explore thespace at their own pace so the technology fades into thebackground and the content comes to the foreground.

Any view of the past is an interpretation. We don’tclaim that Virtual Harlem offers a real experience of thepast; it’s an interpretation that engages studentsthrough lived experiences that model the past. Thesevirtual experiences aren’t actual experiences but theydo engage the visitors cognitively in a way that elicitsemotions and psychological reactions.

We want Virtual Harlem to be much more than areconstruction of the physical environment of Harlem.We want the students to learn about the lives of famouspeople of the period as well as the regular people. To dothis, we recruited creative writers to provide dramaticpresentations of the history of the Harlem Renaissance.We built scripts of daily life into the presentation to dra-matize the historical events, and then actors act outthese scenes, which the annotation system records. Stu-dents can then interact with figures that live in VirtualHarlem and whose character and behavior are as his-torically accurate as we can make it. Although suchexperiences are fictive by definition, the dramatizationsare governed by an effort to interpret what it felt like tolive in Harlem during the 1930s and to encounter themany great artists who worked there (see Figure 4). Stu-dents’ own interpretations can be elicited by educatorsusing Virtual Harlem as a teaching tool, discussed anddebated among students, and further examined andanalyzed in comparison to the histories and analyses ofHarlem already extant.

Admittedly, this is an unconventional form of historytelling. However, we’re making every effort to give stu-dents an experience of the past that matches scholars’

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6 September/October 2002

4 Virtual Harlem isn’t simply an architectural reconstruction. Visitors can meet and hear important people such as(a) Marcus Garvey as well as everyday people on the streets. (b) A visitor meets Langston Hughes in the CAVE.

(a) (b)

interpretations. The governing genre in this endeavoris history, not fiction. The fictive elements arise from theabsence of video or audio documentation. Whereas it’spossible to write sentences such as “residents of Harlemcould purchase the Crisis at a local newsstand, a drama-tization of that event requires a specific figure toapproach the news stand and ask for a copy of the Cri-sis. Because we don’t have photographs of that event orrecordings of what was said, that figure in VirtualHarlem can’t represent an actual person who lived inHarlem at the time. Yet, dramatizing the historical gen-eralization (residents purchased the Crisis at local newsstands) doesn’t entail the genre of fiction. That is, thechoices about how to represent Harlem are rooted in his-torical, rather than fictional, narrative.

We also want to strongly encourage the students tocontribute materials to augment Virtual Harlem. Thestudents can imagine that they’re writers or artists inthe Harlem of the 1920s or 1930s and create a poem,political speech, piece of music, painting, or photo oftheir own and add it to Virtual Harlem for others to see.The students not only do interdisciplinary research onthe time period but also see its results incorporated intoVirtual Harlem itself, providing new dimensions to theirunderstanding of the Harlem Renaissance. We antici-pated that by placing users in the context in which awork of art or literature was created so that theirresearch will be more comprehensive. We also hopedthat from students’ interaction with and contribution toVirtual Harlem they’ll begin to learn to interrogate his-tory and historiography.

Once students experience Virtual Harlem they’reencouraged to form their own opinions on the thingsthey saw and heard in the VE and leave their own anno-tations upon which other students can further com-ment. A key goal of these virtual annotations is toprovoke this kind of feedback loop. Through thisprocess, students and instructors can spur discussionand debate in the classroom or in the VR world. Anoth-er feedback loop can be created for students who con-tribute materials to Virtual Harlem. By observing others’interactions with the environment, they can learn aboutinterpretation and learn to better direct their creationof future contributions to Virtual Harlem.

Current plans and future workAn important aspect of the project is that it produces

many versions of Harlem, allowing for alternative viewsof Harlem during its renaissance. Constructing the defin-itive Harlem isn’t our goal. Instead, we want to showHarlem’s past as one that has been constructed by its cit-izens and display the variety of perspectives that havebeen used in interpreting the Harlem Renaissance. Eachperspective is, in effect, a comment on other perspec-tives. Each requires a defense, which makes explicit thepoints of view involved. It’s important to recognize thatwe can easily move from one model to another in anelectronic environment. We can, technically speaking,go on demand from daytime to nighttime, or from the1920s streetscape to the 1930s streetscape to Harlem in2001. Similarly, we can move from the rather sanitizedHarlem of the present construction to a seedier version

of Harlem. Such multifaceted perspectives built into Vir-tual Harlem will eventually allow the construction ofparticular interpretations of the Harlem Renaissance byshowing what they emphasize, include, and exclude. Amultivalent model of Harlem is the ultimate goal of theVirtual Harlem project.

Currently, Virtual Harlem consists of roughly 10 squareblocks of Harlem. Virtual Harlem’s environment isn’t, atthis point, an exact replica of the Harlem landscape. Manyof the cultural landmarks such as the Savoy Ballroom, theApollo Theater, and the Theresa Hotel weren’t within easywalking distance, so they were moved closer to eachother. We plan to revise the current environment to movethe buildings back to their correct locations.

Virtual Harlem is an amalgamation of several differentyears during the Harlem Renaissance and not a true rep-resentation of any particular date. We plan to show thehistorical changes in Harlem from the 1920s to the mid-1930s through a series of cityscapes set at more specifictime periods. We intend to show the periods within theHarlem Renaissance that correspond to those changesby indicating the development or demise of movementsand periodicals, the migration of artists and musicians,and the changes in the character of the neighborhood.

We currently use a PDA to give random access to thevarious annotations in Virtual Harlem. We’d also like touse larger hand-held devices, such as tablets, as auxil-iary displays within Virtual Harlem. This would give theuser better access to printed materials and supplemen-tal information while touring Virtual Harlem. For exam-ple, if users hear Marcus Garvey giving one of hisspeeches on the street, we can simultaneously make theentire text available on their tablet.

Presently, all the visitors to Virtual Harlem are treat-ed the same, even though people in Harlem at that timeweren’t all treated the same. During the Harlem Renais-sance, blacks reconfigured themselves by passing aswhites. In the future, Virtual Harlem will let userschoose who they will be in the virtual world and thecharacters in the virtual world will react according totheir chosen race, sex, and occupation.

The people that you meet in Virtual Harlem are eitherstatic 2D images taken from photographs or articulatedavatars created through the annotation system. Thearticulated avatars use static texture-mapped faces.However, we’re now moving toward using video avatars9

in the next version that will map prerecorded video ontothe heads of the avatars to improve the realism.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 7

Each perspective is, in effect,

a comment on other perspectives.

Each requires a defense,

which makes explicit the

points of view involved.

Virtual Harlem is a work in progress. For further infor-mation please visit http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/harlem. �

AcknowledgmentsWe’d like to thank the following individuals:

� At EVL: Kyoung Park, Dave Pape, Yong-Joo Cho, TimPortlock, Eric He, Michael Lewis, Naveen Krish-naprasad, Shalini Venkataraman, Janet Kim, AlanVerlo, Greg Dawe, Seung Kang, Natt Mattrask, andJoseph Tremonti.

� At UIC: Janice Lively, Jennifer Brody, and Jim Hall.� At the University of Missouri: Bill Plummer.

The VR research, collaborations, and outreach pro-grams at the EVL at the University of Illinois at Chica-go are made possible by major funding from the USNational Science Foundation (NSF), awards EIA-9802090, EIA-9871058, EIA-0115809, ANI-9980480,ANI-9730202, and ANI-0123399, as well as the NSFPartnerships for Advanced Computational Infra-structure (PACI) cooperative agreement ACI-9619019to the National Computational Science Alliance. EVLalso receives funding from the US Department ofEnergy (DOE) Science Grid program and the DOEASCI Views program. In addition, EVL receives fund-ing from Pacific Interface on behalf of NTT OpticalNetwork Systems Laboratory in Japan and MicrosoftCorporation. Additional support for PocketPCs wasprovided by the Chicago Public School system’sMedill Technical and Professional Development Cen-ter and the Illinois State Board of Education Learn-ing Technology Center 7.

References1. J. Sosnoski and B. Carter, eds., Works and Days 37/38 (spe-

cial issue on the Virtual Harlem Project), vol. 19, nos. 1 and2, fall 2001.

2. B. Carter, “Virtual Harlem,” Proc. Siggraph 99 Conf., ACMPress, New York, 1999, p. 103.

3. D. Pape, Composing Networked Virtual Environments, PhDdissertation, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Illinoisat Chicago, 2001.

4. K. Park et al., “CAVERNsoft G2: A Toolkit for High Perfor-mance Tele-immersive Collaboration,” Proc. ACM Symp.Virtual Reality Software and Technology, ACM Press, NewYork, 2000, pp. 8-15.

5. T. Imai et al., “Overcoming Time-Zone Differences andTime Management Problem with Tele-Immersion,” Proc.Int’l Networking Conf. (INET), 2000, CD-ROM.

6. J. Leigh et al., “AGAVE: Access Grid Augmented VirtualEnvironment,” Proc. Access Grid Retreat, 2001.

7. K. Park et al., “Distance Learning Classroom Using VirtualHarlem,” Proc. 7th Int’l Conf. Virtual Systems and Multime-dia (VSMM 2001), 2001, pp. 489-498.

8. P. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Real-ity: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Doubleday, Gar-den City, N.Y., 1967.

9. V. Rajan et al., “A Realistic Video Avatar System for Net-worked Virtual Environments,” Proc. Immersive ProjectionTechnology (IPT), 2002, CD-ROM.

Andrew Johnson is a member ofthe Electronic Visualization Labora-tory and an assistant professor in theComputer Science Department at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago. Hisresearch focuses on educationalimmersive environments from ele-

mentary school through college, specifically how to inte-grate this new form of representation into the classroomand the curriculum.

Jason Leigh is a senior research sci-entist at the Electronic VisualizationLaboratory at the University of Illi-nois at Chicago. His areas of interestinclude developing techniques forinteractive, remote, visual data min-ing of terascale data sets over high-

speed gigabit optical networks; developing techniques forsupporting long-term collaborative work in amplified workenvironments; and scalable commodity graphics for large-scale immersive data visualization.

Bryan Carter is an assistant pro-fessor in the English and PhilosophyDepartment at Central MissouriState University. His area of special-ty is American Literature with a con-centration in African-AmericanLiterature of the Harlem Renais-

sance. He has a secondary area of emphasis in visual stud-ies. He received his PhD from the University ofMissouri-Columbia.

Jim Sosnoski is a professor of com-munication at the University of Illi-nois at Chicago. He has publishednumerous essays on instructionaltechnology, computer-assisted peda-gogy, and online collaboration. Cur-rently, he is working on configuring a

study of virtual reality as a learning environment.

Steve Jones is a professor, head ofcommunications, and research asso-ciate in the Electronic VisualizationLab at the University of Illinois atChicago. He also serves as a seniorresearch fellow for the Pew Internet& American Life Project and is

cofounder and president of the Association of InternetResearchers.

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