From: Jorge Alvoeiro Subject: Re: TECH: Virtual worlds with alternative physics and/or Date: Mon, 08 Apr 1996 13:49:00 +0100 Message-ID: <31690B3C.3FF1@psy.hull.ac.uk> Organization: Dept. of Psychology, Hull University, Hull HU6 7RX, England Edlantz wrote: > > Jorge, I am not arguing that we should not persue > simulating/stimulating all sensory modalities. I only make the point > that relaxing or "violating" strict physical laws can be a powerful > device for user interfaces. Why not represent tactile information > aurally? Or represent aural information visually? If we constrain > ourselves too rigidly to an accurate representation of our physical > reality, we are missing out on one of the primary advantages of > virtual worlds... the transcendence of physical limitations. Of > course, without a sensory representation to begin with, one can hardly > violate the physics of it. We cannot do what you have suggested because my, your and every other people's brain is not prepared for switching modalities. We, humans, have developed through thousands of years to reach a level of cortical activity which is pre-programmed for Earth physical laws. Sorry but there is nothing you can do, unless you move into another planet and after a few generations one switch channels. What one can do is to understand the outside stimulus and process it according to what one already knows and learn from that stimulus if is new to us. But, (there is always a but) one has always to revert to Earth physical laws. For instances, what would happen if one would spend one's life using kineasthetic sensory modality to 'see' objects and suddenly can use visual modality. This has already being reported in those who have being blind from birth and after surgery can see. If one takes these people to a zoo and show them typical zoo animals, elephants, lions and others, and ask them to look and report what they are seing they do not know what they are looking at. In fact it becomes very upsetting to them and I have heard of cases where some of these people want to go back being blind again. There is also a happy end to this in that if one gives a physical representation of the animal one is going to show to these people before they actually see it they would make a connection between what they are looking at and the pre-kineasthetic information. In other words they activate those parts of their brains which are used to recognized an elephant and when see an elephant is like they can make an association between what they are looking at and what they know already through their kineasthetic modality. So even though one has sensory representation of what the stimulus may be like one cannot move that human straight into another without any physical or cognitive pre-preparation if it is very much different from the one one is already used to. > Certainly there are hard-wired perceptual mechanisms in our brains > which must be exploited. The representation of depth, for instance, > can be represented by stereopsis, motion parallax, shading, and other > cues. The accurate representation of distance and depth is a separate > issue from how we exploit distance and depth. In the physical world, > the farther an object, the longer it takes to approach it given > practical limitations on velocity. In a virtual world, such > limitations amount to a line of code which can be easily altered to > serve some practical end. My point may seem obvious, but I feel that > it has not yet fully dawned on all VE designers yet. Granted, many > are still busy simulating the physics that I would eagerly violate.... Well, there are aspects of this physical world which we still do not know what is going on. For instances the visual system is the easiest system to fool with. Even nature has its tricks and when it does there is a good change of a very serious accident. For instances, why do helicopter pilots in hot areas have so many accidents when at night they move from land onto sea? Because they do not look at their altimeters in order to find out how far away they are from the water. Instead they keep looking at the water which if one is new to this type environment gives false visual depth cues. The result is 'splash'. Now if one creates this sort of situation in VE it would allows us to study the physical laws of what goes on and also allows future pilots to orient their attention to their instrumention rather than looking outside. Thus lets first find out what goes out there because there are lots of things which one still does not know what really happens. Violate what one already knows is very easy. What is more difficult is to find out and understand what goes on because there is no physics answer for it YET. > Perhaps the best way to communicate my view is to draw this analogy: A > virtual environment is akin to dreaming. What happens is a greater > function of what we want to happen. We are subject to the limitations of > our VR system rather than the laws of physics. And fortunately, the > limitations of VR systems are subject to rapid improvement in our > lifetimes. The limitations of physics take a bit longer to overcome. If > physics is bothering us, we can change it or make it go away in a VE... > that is, if the programmer has afforded us this luxury. No, is not!!! VE is not akin to dreaming. For instances if a person has a missing sense one is very unlikely to be able to dream using the missing sensory input. In VE one is supposed to activate every sensory modality. Also when one is 'flying' in a dream one still does it using earth physical laws. Our sensory activity would not do otherwise. Our brain is wired in such way which would only 'produce' sensory output in the same way as it processes. When one is in a sensory deprivation tank one still gets physics illusions. The system does not know otherwise. Some time ago someone here said that the ultimate VE site is the 'holodeck' of 'Star Trek'. This creates physical objects which are made of VR holograms with shaped force fields in order to have a 'real' interactive/immersive VE. There is some work to be done in this area but this sort of situation may be more akin to what a virtual environment should be like. 'Johnny Mnemonic' may be too far fetch for earth human beings. Bye for now. Jorge -- Jorge Alvoeiro Phone: [+44] (0)1482 465778 Dept. of Psychology Fax: [+44] (0)1482 465599 Hull University E-Mail: J.Alvoeiro@psy.hull.ac.uk Cottingham Road. Hull, HU6 7RX, England.