The space of Alive on the Grid consists of a central connecting area (called the Confluxus - figure 1) and ten worlds that participants can reach from there. The central Confluxus was valuable because of the 'show' nature of Alive on the Grid -- when new groups of visitors arrived at the Festival site, they and the remote participants could assemble at the Confluxus for introductions and orientation, before heading off into the actual pieces. The individual pieces are "Home", "Looking for Water", "Super Spectacular", "PAAPAB", "Infinite Studio", "Through the Looking Glass", "syn.aesthetic", "Excavation", "Beatbox", and "Incarnation of a Divine Being". These pieces explored a wide range of possible approaches to VR art. The environments varied from complex collections of pre-built models and sounds to highly dynamic particle effects to spaces where visitors created objects or music themselves. The interactions varied from activating simple triggers to motion-captured dancing to a collaborative, improvised drama.
Many of the artists involved in Alive on the Grid have been involved in creating VR works for several years. However, almost none had created networked pieces before. The question of how to involve multiple people at widely separate locations in a single virtual art piece is still a difficult one. In many cases, the participants were simply in the same space and experiencing it together, similar to a group visiting a traditional museum exhibit together. In some cases, though, interaction between the people was an important part of the piece. In the following sections we describe a selection of the environments and highlight some of the interesting features of each one.
Figure 1. Participants gathered in the Confluxus