Departments combine to fit Jigsaw
	Living art: Jigsaw will enable students to "tour" sites like Borobudur in virtual reality
By Julian Lee Six ANU departments are working on different parts of a project which will enable virtual or three-dimensional environments to run on the World Wide Web. The project - aptly named "Jigsaw"- will create electronic images by assembling lots of small pieces of the images. The Jigsaw program - to be used in teaching, design and exhibition - will enable images to be transmitted across the Web at a quality and size now impossible. It will place high-resolution colour photos onto 3D "skeletons". This is a sophisticated form of the technology used in Quake - an immensely popular virtual reality computer game. "It is an absolutely marvellous system that will enable you to move around a 3D colour photographic image, turn it, and zoom in on it," one of the project's participants, Prof Chris Bryant of the Centre for Public Awareness of Science said. "Think of what you could do in biology," he enthused. "The ability to visualise and manipulate 'invisible' molecules, or explore botanical collections from your own computer would be invaluable." Art followers will also benefit. "The teaching of art history is removed from reality by the very fact of displaying slides, all exactly the same size, two-by-two in a darkened room. The Sistine ceiling comes up the same size as a manuscript page," head of the project, Art History Professor Michael Greenhalgh said. The project will solve this by allowing students to "visit" virtual versions of the Sistine Chapel, Borobudur, or Pompeii. "This is a poor substitute for actually being there, but more realistic than viewing slides, or pictures in a book," he said. "The difficulty is that nobody has done this before. The vast amount of data that must go over the networks to make the images look good will probably cause some networks to appear like they are moving in treacle. We need to gradate the delivery somehow, so that people with different resources get the images at different resolutions," he said. Prof Greenhalgh has been awarded $120,000 by the Major Equipment Committee (MEC) to put together his Jigsaw project. "I am grateful to the MEC for the money, and for the confidence it represents. I hope this may encourage the ANU to push web-based learning as a matter of urgency," Prof Greenhalgh said. "Commercial applications are not out of the question, a 'virtual shopping trolley' could easily trundle down a 'virtual supermarket aisle' and pick up the cornflakes. It sounds silly at first - but then so did tinned rice pudding when it came to my attention in about 1955."