From: Alan Bucior Subject: Re: DESIGN: Is there really such a thing as text-based VR? Date: Fri, 01 Mar 1996 11:28:54 -0800 Organization: Hughes Aircraft of Canada, Ltd. From: Alan Bucior Farrell McGovern (ai474@freenet.carleton.ca) wrote: : Text is a very information poor medium for communicating a VR, : simply because it takes a great deal of data to give you sufficent : information to contruct a virtual world. Like a graphical VR, you use : a display, and tend to interact with it via your hand movements. Chris Hand wrote: > > No no no... text is a VERY efficient way of representing an > environment compared to graphics. > > Consider: > > "One hundred thousand golden bees glinted in the setting > sun as they whirled themselves into a tornado of rainbows > and plunged, hissing, into the ocean." > > I make that around 170 bytes. > > Show me what you can do with 170 bytes of VRML, then > we'll talk again. :) I just thought I'd mention that if you get down to the crux of what you two are arguing about, it really comes down to lossless vs. lossy compression. Text/speech is an incredibly lossy algorithm for communication of ideas. It's very difficult to describe an object or situation exactly via text. Rather, the result is always an approximation interpreted by the receiver in such a way that is almost never exactly what the original party intended. For example, if person A tries to describe a picture over the phone to person B, and person B draws what he believes person A is trying to communicate, the result is usually quite bad. I would hazard a guess that it would usually be a lot worse than a compressed JPEG taking up the same number of bytes as the text of his speech. -- Alan Bucior Hughes Aircraft Systems Division abucior@ccgate.hac.com Richmond, BC #include