From: Craig Hubley Subject: Re: Imagination vs. VR (was Re: More on MUDs etc.) Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1991 02:09:08 -0400 Organization: Craig Hubley & Associates In article <1991Aug11.012001.4818@milton.u.washington.edu> fortony@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Felix Sebastian Ortony) writes: > >ssmoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) writes: > >>Let me now return to Felix's initial praise of the imagination. Perhaps I am >>becoming too much of a conservative pessimist, but I continue to believe that >>there is no substitute for books. One of the most important things you can >>bring with you from a good education is the discovery that books are NOT A >>PASSIVE EXPERIENCE. Sitting and reading a book is only a part of what that >>book is good for. A book only comes to life when you RETURN to it with the >>intention of CONSULTING it for some goal or another (even if the goal is to >>revive a pleasant memory associate with a poem you once read). Some of this >>consultation is driven by what we may call "imaginative reading." That is, >>a book is not simply a repository of facts but a trigger for our own thoughts. Some useful terminology, from McLuhan: a "hot" medium causes increased mental activity in the viewer/participant, while a "cool" medium does the opposite. The "couch potato syndrome" is pretty well documented in the literature, and there are of course arguments that even very violent TV does not really much stimulate the viewer... I disagree that a book "only comes to life" when you return to it. In essence reading the book itself is returning to sensations that you remember since you need to recall these to visualize what is happening in the book and thereby understand its action, characters, etc... Text is very "hot" precisely because it fills in so few gaps in the mind and forces it to work so hard. Radio is hotter than TV... Now, VR can go two ways. If we work real hard on audiovisual clarity and not so hard on interactivity, we end up cool. If we work hard on interactivity and ditch AV clarity for a while, we end up hot. It has often been observed on systems like Minitel, etc., that people are most stimulated and participatory when they are invisible and anonymous and 100% "hot" to other's imaginations... This also tends to explain other phenomenon like email flaming, etc... I suggest that polygons/second is a damn poor measurement of VR. The best VR I have seen was a MUD running on a Commodore 64 (the glorious Habitat). I suggest that any budding VR designer go out and buy a crumbling old copy of McLuhan's "Understanding Media" and then spend a lot of time in "passive" environments like traditional museums and art galleries, counting up the ways that people interact with (and in) them, and how this affects their status relationships, kinetic dance, definition of personal space, etc... for more on THAT, try Keith Johnstone's "Impro". -- Craig Hubley "...get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert." Craig Hubley & Associates------------------------------------Henry Ford Sr. craig@gpu.utcs.Utoronto.CA UUNET!utai!utgpu!craig craig@utorgpu.BITNET craig@gpu.utcs.toronto.EDU {allegra,bnr-vpa,decvax}!utcsri!utgpu!craig 28 First Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4M 1W8 Canada Voice: (416) 466-4097