dave pape
.... projects .... publications .... teaching .... bio/cv .... links ....

Crayoland

Crayoland is an interactive virtual environment created for the CAVE. It was first shown at the EVE 4 art show in May 1995. The environment is anti-photorealistic; it is built entirely from crude crayon drawings; the drawings are all flat 2 dimensional objects, but form a 3 dimensional world.

The world created for Crayoland is a 200' x 200' field, filled with trees, flowers, a lake and stream, and a house, and surrounded by mountains. Small objects (the flowers and rocks) can be picked up and moved. There are numerous positional sounds, such as the quacking of the ducks in the lake, birds chirping in the woods, and bees buzzing. When you walk through the lake, there are splash sounds from your footsteps.

The environment is also inhabited by some independent creatures - bees and butterflies. The butterflies wander randomly about the field; if you pause near one and hold out your hand (the wand), the butterfly may decide to land on it and rest briefly. The bees normally spend their time travelling back and forth between their hive and the flowers scattered around the field, ignoring any people. If you are too nosy and disturb the hive, the bees will become annoyed and give chase.


Crayoland has been widely distributed as a standard CAVE demo; most CAVE and ImmersaDesk sites have a copy. As a result, it has been shown quite frequently, including to luminaries such as Mikhail Gorbachev (see AVL news).

A short (1 minute) video documentation of Crayoland can be found in the SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 127, or the SIGGRAPH '98 Electronic Art & Animation Catalog CD-ROM.

[edit] Brain Exhibit

An adapted version of Crayoland was shown as part of the museum exhibit [http://www.pfizer.com/brain/ "Brain: The World Inside Your Head"], as the section called the "Dreamscape Theater". This version is a low-cost installation; it runs non-interactively and monoscopically on two projection screens. It is driven by a single Linux PC and a pair of LCD projectors.

The exhibit opened at the Smithsonian Institution in July 2001. It travelled to various science museums across the U.S. (see exhibit web page).

See this article in the Journal of the American Medical Association for the only writeup I've found so far that describes the Dreamscape Theater. (It's mildly negative about the use of Crayoland to represent dreaming, but hey, I wasn't the exhibit designer.)

Thanks to Tom Coffin for photos of the actual exhibit.

[edit] Downloads

crayoland.tar.gz - complete tar file of Crayoland, including data and source code

Note: This version is new, as of 1 March 2001. It is now based on the Bergen sound library+server, and also can be compiled under Linux.

crayoland_vss.tar.gz - older version of Crayoland, based on the VSS 2.2 sound server.

A VRML version of Crayoland can be found on my old CAVE applications in VRML page.

[edit] Snapshots

Image for CACM

Screenshot 0

Screenshot 1

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Screenshot 5

in the DLP CAVE

at Ars Electronica

at Ars Electronica

at Zukunftszentrum Innsbruck

[edit] Shows

Crayoland has been shown publicly at these events:

It is also a part of the permanent collection of CAVE works at the Ars Electronica Center. And (apparently) it has been shown at the Singapore Science Centre.

[edit] Press

Mention or images of Crayoland have appeared in the following: