From: fortony@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Felix Sebastian Ortony)
Subject: Re: Imagination vs. VR (was Re: More on MUDs etc.)
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 1991 19:45:46 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL


aaronp@tekig2.pen.tek.com (Aaron Pulkka) writes:

>        A virtual world should never be 'done'.  A good virtual world 
>should constantly be changing in response to its participant's actions (like
>the 'real' world) [unless the designer chooses it to be static].
>Any difficulty in adding an arm to your virtual robot could only come
>from an inadequate definition of your generic virtual robot.  If you define
>it to have an arbitrary number of attachements (of somewhat aribitrary types),
>adding an additional arm should take little effort and should be something 
>that can occur on-the-fly.  Almost all facets of a virtual world can be 
>altered; if it's difficult to alter some, that was a design decision.

I admit to temporary imaginative failure.  Clearly, there are sentences and
ideas I can come up with in the English language which cannot be expected or
easily duplicated in VR, such as 'this shard of cold, sharp pottery cuts
your hand.  Your blood tastes like the sea you've lived near all your life."
Adding an arm to a robot, perhaps.  You can't predict everything, however,
without being omniscient, and that's what I'm really trying to get at.
English, or languages in general, are much more natural tools for symbol
manipulation and communication because that's entirely what they're built
for.  Comparing visual information to linguistic information is like comparing
a bus to a pen; both have their purposes, but the bus will never be able to
write a love poem.

>	Besides, if the virtual environment is multi-participatory the 
>designer may be in the world interacting with the with the other participants
>(try that with a book) [granted, it isn't meta-involvement].

I try that with books all the time, actually, though our use of 'books' is
probably not very strict.  My friends and I often write story segments
involving the same character, attempting to leave him in the worst possible
situation at the end of our segment so the next person will have a devil of
a time writing him out of it.  This may not be a fair comparison, since it
involves the writing process as well as the reading process, but then
comparing VR to the reading process solely is also a bit unjust.

>	When people design virtual worlds, they will (do) take them
>to 'workshops' of sorts, and get feedback from other designers.  But consider
>being able to gain feedback from all your readers, instead of a select few, 
>while they are reading your work. 

I'm not sure the feedback would be any different between VR and a writing
workshop.  Just as people may feel unqualified to respond to a certain
passage, they might refrain from doing anything to a certain spatial segment.

>        I doubt anyone is trying to replace books with VR.  Books certainly
>have their own special qualities, but interactivity is a quality in VR that
>many other forms of media (books included) are lacking.

Someone previously mentioned that VR was, in someone's opinion, destined to
be a replacement for language.  That struck me like a bolt of lightning, and
I'm still wondering about the logic behind the statement.  Does language
need replacing, and is the general opinion of VR researchers that they're
creating something which can do that?


fortony@cs.uiuc.edu
(welcoming e-mail on the topic for possible collation)


[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Esther Dyson addressed this issue on a panel at last
year's SIGGRAPH, proceedings of which have just been published by the ACM.
She also put down some thoughts on the notion of the "literal" and the
"virtual" in a subsequent edition of Release 1.0. -- Bob Jacobson]