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The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word.
Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot cube, wherein the floor and three walls are projected with high-resolution stereo graphics to create a virtual environment, viewed through special “shutter-lens” glasses.  The Cave Writing Workshop has introduced a Macintosh sound server to provide positional sound and augment the Cave’s performance potential, surrounding the “reader” with dynamic three-dimensional sound as well as visuals. It has brought text into this highly visual environment in the composing of narrative and poetic works of art, and has experimented with navigational structures more akin to narrative, and in particular hypertext narrative, than to the predominant forms of spatial exploration.
Since its opening in the spring of 1999, with support from IBM and the National Science Foundation, the facility has been used by faculty and students in chemistry, geology, cognitive and linguistic sciences, physics, archaeology, biology, computer science, and applied mathematics, as well as creative writing, for a wide variety of innovative projects. In the near future this website will include descriptions and video documentation of various Cave Writing projects, more details on the Cave Writing Workshop, and links to other Cave projects and resources at Brown and beyond.
Brown University Creative Writing | Electronic Writing |
