Virtual love

It’s not every day you have the opportunity to step into a key role in a piece of classical French literature, but that’s what’s on offer when you meet Prof Marc Cavazza.

His research group at Teesside University has created a virtual reality (VR) environment in which not only are key characters from Gustave Flaubert’s 19th-century literary masterpiece Madame Bovary brought to ‘virtual’ life - but you can become one of the leading characters.

It is all down to six years of hard work by a dedicated research team within the university’s School of Computing - Cavazza and Teesside graduates Fred Charles, Jean-Luc Lugrin and David Pizzi - who are pushing at the frontiers of virtual reality for art and entertainment.

'We used a commercial game engine as a development environment to support real-time visualisation and created new artificial intelligence components to control virtual actors,’ said Professor Cavazza.

He described the stage created by the VR system as ‘an immersive interactive storytelling environment’. It has three walls and a floor used as screens, and is operated by a computerised system using dedicated software to support real-time stereoscopic visualisation.