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Graphics, Visualization, Usability
Gorillas in the Bits
By Amanda Crowell
AS A SOFT BREEZE BREAKS through the springtime heat at
Zoo Atlanta, a young female gorilla's mind turns to troublemaking.
Tired of grooming and napping, she heads toward a large silverback male
resting in the shade of an immense oak tree.
PHOTO BY JOE SEABO
Tara Sconza, an eighth-grader at The Westminster Schools, tries
out the virtual reality gorilla exhibit with help from Lori Perkins,
conservation biologist for Zoo Atlanta.
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At first, the old male simply glares at the youngster as she playfully lunges at him and strikes aggressive poses she's learned from the other apes. But when his stares and annoyed coughs go unheeded, he suddenly charges the juvenile, screaming and beating his fists against his chest. Wisely, she flees.
Excited and a little scared, the female retreats to a nearby wooden shelter and pulls off her helmet. This gorilla, as it turns out, is actually a human student seeing firsthand how apes interact in the wild, through virtual reality.
The experience is part of a unique educational program created by Georgia Tech and Zoo Atlanta.
"The best way for kids to understand gorilla behavior is to become a gorilla," says Kyle Burks, a research associate with Zoo Atlanta's Conservation Action Resource Center (ARC). "This experience is probably the closest we could come in the world to doing that."
In May, researchers from the two organizations conducted a one-day trial run of the world's first virtual reality gorilla exhibit in the Ford African Rain Forest's Gorillas of the Cameroon Interpretive Center.
Local schoolchildren were on hand to try out the system, which put them into a "real" gorilla habitat as a member of a gorilla family.
"While watching the students interact with the virtual gorillas, I was most impressed by how quickly they learned to behave like gorillas in appropriate ways," says Burks. "That's evidence of how great the model and the experience really are."
Dr. Jean Wineman, an associate professor and director of the doctoral program in Georgia Tech's College of Architecture, agrees.
"Participatory experiences have been shown to increase motivation and retention of information," Wineman says. "We expect this will be a powerful experiential educational tool in sensitizing children to the gorilla world and giving them an understanding of the behavioral interactions that create gorilla society."
A Realistic Model
To make the project an effective teaching tool, researchers worked hard to make both the virtual environment and the virtual apes as realistic as possible. They used photographs, videos, contour maps, architectural blueprints and design layouts to properly recreate the gorilla's environment.
PHOTO COURTESY LARRY HODGES
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"This is the most accurate and detailed model of a real outdoor area that has ever been created for a virtual environment," says Dr. Larry Hodges, an associate professor in the College of Computing and an associate director of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center. "Brian Wills [a research scientist in the College of Architecture] spent over 700 hours creating the computer model of the habitat."
Accurate models, in turn, will help researchers design better habitats -- a goal of any zoo conservationist -- and build better exhibits for spectators. Wineman plans to use the virtual reality zoo concept as a design tool in a course called Environmental Psychology, offered under the College of Architecture and the School of Psychology. It will be co-taught by Dr. Terry L. Maple, director of Zoo Atlanta and a Georgia Tech psychology professor.
"Current zoo design is based on the concept of 'landscape immersion,'" Wineman says. "A visitor should feel that he or she has entered the animals' world and comes upon the animals unexpectedly, as one might in the wild. The virtual exhibit as a design tool will provide an analysis capability that will allow designers to assess proposed design solutions, alter them and reassess the results."
But creating an accurate environment is only half the work. The virtual gorillas also have to look and behave like real gorillas.
Using videos, anthropomorphic data and behavioral data on movement and interaction, Georgia Tech doctoral student Don Allison created virtual gorillas that simulate real movement and generalized behavior.
"Our job was, 'Can we do something that would be accurate gorilla behavior?'" Hodges explains. "So if an adolescent male gorilla approaches the dominant silverback male gorilla, the Zoo Atlanta researchers could tell us the range and probabilities of the silverback's actual responses."
Zoo researchers were impressed with the program's first run, which wasn't easy to achieve. Unlike monkeys, apes are not extremely active animals, and much of their social interaction is subtle -- a cut of the eyes, a flick of the hand or an annoyed cough.
"People always expect them to be like monkeys, who do run around," says Lori Perkins, conservation biologist with the Conservation ARC. "The Georgia Tech researchers certainly could have gone in that direction. They could have made a cartoon gorilla. But the whole point was to make it realistic."
Exploring the Virtual Environment
The students who tested the virtual reality program began their journey in the Gorillas of the Cameroon Interpretive Center, an observation building for one of the zoo's four gorilla habitats. This particular habitat is the home of Zoo Atlanta's most famous gorilla, Willie B. The 38-year-old, 439-lb. silverback shares his home with three adult females -- Kinyani, Mia Moja and Choomba -- and two of his offspring, 2-year-old Kudzoo (Choomba's daughter), and Mia Moja's daughter Olympia, born in June.
PHOTO COURTESY LARRY HODGES
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In the virtual reality program, the student became part of a generic gorilla family by "melting" through the observation building's glass windows into the habitat. She assumed the role of a juvenile gorilla who becomes restless in the company of an adult male and an adult female, both of whom are resting contently.
The male demands the largest area of personal space, roughly five meters. He will rebuke an annoying or aggressive approach with mock charges, chest beating, enraged screams and/or direct physical attack.
Females, by contrast, are more tolerant and will accept a submissive approach -- slow, with no physical contact -- as an invitation for grooming. Females also will warn the juvenile before attacking, with aggressive stances, gruff coughs and discontented stares.
The juvenile, who is at the bottom of the hierarchy, will always back down from a fight. To make sure human children understand and adhere to this social order, researchers built a "timeout" function into the program.
If the juvenile continues to move toward an adult gorilla, despite its rebukes, the virtual reality screen goes black, then reads, "You're in timeout." When the program resumes, the student is back in the observation building and is no longer a gorilla.
"You're dealing with real kids here," Hodges says, laughing. "We figured some kids would go up and harass the adult gorilla and wouldn't back off and learn how to act properly, from the signals the adult was giving."
Future Development
In the future, researchers hope the virtual reality gorilla exhibit will become a permanent feature at the zoo, as well as a traveling exhibit for schools. To do that, they'll need to refine the program to run on smaller, less expensive computers.
And since the demonstration in May was meant only as a trial run, to test the system and gather feedback from real children, many changes and additions are in the works. These include letting zoo visitors explore all of the gorillas' habitat, such as the usually off-limits night quarters; providing more information about care, conservation and research activities at the zoo; and adding more gorillas to the virtual reality program.
"A recurrent comment from the children who were involved in the demo was their interest in having a 'child' gorilla to interact with," Wineman says. "The advantage of a young gorillas is that they tend to display a more varied and playful array of behaviors."
Other refinements include guidelines on how to interpret the adult gorillas' vocalizations, differences in the volume and direction of the vocalizations, and more automation of the gorillas' behavior. Currently, their reactions are controlled by a computer student working at a central machine.
For Zoo Atlanta officials, using virtual technologies provides them with an additional avenue to link children with the natural world via technology.
"Our Zoo Atlanta team of scientists and educators first began to plan a 'virtual zoo' three years ago," says Maple, who also is one of the world's foremost authorities on gorilla behavior. "We instantly thought of Georgia Tech as our design partner, and we are extremely impressed with the scholarly approach taken by Dr. Hodges and Dr. Wineman, who have worked closely with our behavior experts.
"With the help of Georgia Tech, we hope to work together to expand this project so that the 'virtual zoo' will one day be a reality," he adds.
Funding for the project comes from Zoo Atlanta and Georgia Tech's EduTech Institute. The Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center provided virtual reality and computer resources.
Further information is available from the Virtual Reality Gorilla
Exhibit:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/grads/a/Don.Allison/gorilla/gorilla.html
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Last updated: May 6, 1997