From: weiser@parc.xerox.com (Mark Weiser)
Subject: Re: Computerized Reality: Better than VR
Date: 	Thu, 18 Jul 1991 14:09:16 PDT
Organization: Xerox PARC




>[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  I and others will no doubt make this issue of
>SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN a best-seller!  :-)  Avoiding the need for another
>quicky post, let me admit, I still can't distinguish "embodied
>virtuality" from 2-1/2D computer graphics.  Can you enlighten me
>and others who may be similarly unaware? I have asked before for
>definitions, without result.  Thanks. -- Bob Jacobson]

It has nothing at all to do with 2-1/2D computer graphics.  Pierre
said he is working on interfaces by which the user interacts directly
with the desktop.  He did not mean the computer desktop, he meant that
real piece of wood or metal with drawers and coffee stains!

I am not much of a believer in definitions as such, except as starting
points for thinking (too much they tend to be end points).  It took me
a whole article to say it in SciAm, probably should have been a book,
and there is not one definition.  But try this:

The idea is to make the computer pervasively present analogously to
the way electrical technology, or "literacy technology" is.  We have
words all around us, everyplace from billboards to candy wrappers.  An
office will usually have hundreds of different surfaces of all sizes
with words on them, all accessible at a glance (include postits, book
bindings, phone messages, and so on).  This pervasive use of literacy
technology is an inspiration for the kind of computer use we could
strive for.  Computer displays (including auditory and tactile
"displays") everywhere, but spread out all over the office and life.

BTW, this is not a paperless office idea.  Paper is great--but would
be even nicer if attached to little wireless interactive chips and
displays to the papers for better tracking, interaction, linking, etc.

To be a little concrete: I think that the room of the future will have
hundreds of inch-sized devices (computer postits), tens of foot-sized
devices (scrap computers, analogous to scrap paper), and one or two
wall-sized displays.  All networked, all providing an integrated user
interface (although I hate the term user interface--it divides us from
our machines instead of acknowledging the basic interpretive nature of
knowledge).  It is this vision of the future that I started calling
ubiquitous computing more than two years ago.  Ubiquitous computing
was then picked up and changed by others to just mean mobile
computing, so I have more recently been using the term embodied
virtuality.  Harder to co-opt.

Embodied Virtuality--the virtual computer world made available in
hundreds of physical devices (bodies) all over the room which one
interacts without thinking twice about it.

-mark
--
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	weiser@xerox.com	Phone: +1-415-494-4406