From: brucec@phoebus.labs.tek.com (Bruce Cohen)
Subject: Re: Imagination vs. VR (was Re: More on MUDs etc.)
Date: 15 Aug 91 18:52:21 GMT
Organization: Computer Research Lab, Tektronix Inc.


In article <1991Aug14.200949.6637@milton.u.washington.edu>
craig@utcs.utoronto.ca (Craig Hubley) writes:
> ...
> 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.
> ...

I think interactivity is a separate issue, although I would agree that
interactivity tends to make a medium more "hot".  But VR has an
inherently different style of interactivity from that of a book.  A
reader interacts with a book in a somewhat solipsistic fashion: she
incrementally builds a model of the book in her head as she reads, based
on her reading so far, her own experiences, and models she's built of books
she's read previously.  As she reads, she carries on a dialog with that
model, refining the model when it fails to match the book (or not; often
a reader's dissatisfaction with a book is the result of dissonance
between it and the model in which the book suffers).  The model is the
creation of the reader; the author of the book doesn't get a chance to
review it and suggest changes.  This isn't necessarily bad; it's just a
constraint of the textual medium that a writer has to recognize.

VR, on the other hand, at least offers the possibility of a more
interactive style of internal model building.  Interactivity is there,
unlike the more passive, "cooler", media like television, because the VR
user is forced to build up a model of the world he finds himself in,
just in order to continue to interact with the world.  In addition, the
user's actions can modify the world, and the way the world reacts to
these actions can further inform the user's model of it.  The author of
the VR world can plan its reactions so that it actively conducts a
dialog with the user's model (or at least what the VR system can deduce
about it); much more actively than a book can.

> ...
> 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".

Glad you put quotes around "passive" there.  It's humbling for an artist
to see just how active a person can be when viewing any work, and how
much can be gotten from a work that the artist never knew about or
intended.  On the other hand, the more degrees of freedom are available
in the viewing, the more can be gotten.  Position and view orientation
are nowhere near as variable in viewing a painting as a sculpture;
listening or reading excerpts works with music or writing but isn't as
useful with static visual media.  VR can offer additional dimensions to
both the author and the audience.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker-to-managers, aka
Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab        email: brucec@crl.labs.tek.com
Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc.                phone: (503)627-5241
M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR  97077