Virtual Environments and Paintings

In the video "Peter Gornstein: Virtual Environments”, Gornstein talks about virtual environments and how they create what they consider making a virtual world.  Gornstein and his team build virtual worlds for games.

He says that one of the important things in a virtual environments background characters just like in the renaissance paintings. Even though though these characters do not change the gameplay, these characters give the story and background of that society and environment. Similarly, all of the objects in a painting give the viewer some emotions and feelings about the picture.

Another thing that Gornstein talks about is bounds of the virtual environment. The bounds of a virtual environment are the bounds of creater’s imagination. You can create a virtual environment without any bounds, bigger than a city or bigger than the universe. Yet, a painting is bounded by the size of canvas. If you have 1 meter squared canvas, you cannot draw a 2 meter squared painting. However, a painter can fit anything into a painting in details by making objects smaller or some another method.

To sum up, building virtual environments has many common  properties with drawing paintings. Both have some background objects or characters that gives information about that environment and both does not have bounds except imagination.