The AW KriegMar Gallery "Openings"

Courtesy of Paul Marcano

The gallery was commissioned by author and photographer Richard Krieger and built by myself, artist and graphic designer, Paul Marcano. Both of us share the space and present a wide range of digital photos we have taken. On Friday nights, 8:00 pm PST, you can often meet the artist and photographers featured in the KriegMar Gallery in Active Worlds at - AW 2249N 857W.

While you may have to bring your own wine and cheese on Friday nights, at least one of the featured photographers tries to be available to chat with visitors. The discussions often range from what digital cameras were used to how to use Active Worlds to present and market your digital images.

The gallery was designed to cross-link back to static web pages where you can see 2D representations of the KriegMar Gallery. "I really think Active Worlds is a fabulously flexible way to build a 3D presentation gallery. You can then take wonderful screen shots from multitude angles to incorporate into traditional web pages. The sense of presence is quite effective even as a 2D image, they are fast to load and can be made into efficient, clickable image maps for zooming into the images. I feel it is far more effective to see clickable 'thumbnail' images mounted from a 3D perspective, you can then use popup windows to reveal the enlargements straight on."

Whether you discover the gallery through our 2D websites (https://www.saltspringer.com/richard/gallery - https://www.saltspring.com/vbc/dreams) or the 3D Active Worlds site, there is a sense that the two dimensions can work very well between each other.

For the time being there is nothing too sophisticated about buying the images presented. Since images have so many applications, we make sales and arrangements to use our images directly through e-mail contact with prospective buyers. See 'Purchasing Images' on the 2D websites.

The concept of 3D e-commerce will most likely catch on when more people gain access to fiber optic networks and high speed Internet access - we still connect by modem from where we are, but a 3D Accellerator Video Card makes a huge improvement. " I actually think Active Worlds is the closest 'Star Trek-like halo-deck' experience to come along on the Internet and it can obviously only get better!

Richard and I also plan to have a 'real world' opening of our work in a downtown gallery here on Salt Spring Island, BC where we live. We will simultaneously hang our prints and then project a large, wall-sized version of the Active Worlds gallery 'live and interactive' onto one of the walls. This cross-world dimensional show will demonstrate just how much of a virtual 3D portal our Active Worlds gallery truly is!"

It is a most exciting innovation to build within the Active World's environment without the usual architectural restrictions of gravity and load bearing engineering concerns. "Across the street from the KriegMar Gallery I have erected a couple of other innovative buildings, one is a multi-story office building ( floor space for rent? ) and the other, linked by a corridor above the street, takes you to the offices of Mind Stone Art. Here I feature links to most of my other multi-media enterprises.

All in all we are eternally grateful to the Active Worlds programmers for providing such a wonderful set of tools for realizing so many 'dreamensions' of our imagination and for the beautifully organized way that one can access so many other worlds within worlds within worlds."

I for one am completely sold on the concept and hope others will appreciate just how far ahead of the curve Active Worlds is. The possibilities seem to be as far reaching as one cares to use one's imagination. This is definitely not escaping reality but rather creating a new one, from scratch and without political borders - one world... within another and another, ad infinitum, kind of fractal-like.

In any case, we look forward to greeting visitors Friday nights, when we can and cordially invite everyone to drop by from time to time and see our newer images. Richard just got back from the Galapagos and I have just returned from the Canadian Rockies, so we hope to expand the gallery show throughout the final quarter of 2001.

Drop by, all are welcome.
AW 2249 N 857W