From: ai474@freenet.carleton.ca (Farrell McGovern)
Subject: Re: DESIGN: Is there really such a thing as text-based VR?
Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 08:02:35 GMT
Message-ID: <DnKx0B.6tC@freenet.carleton.ca>
Organization: The National Capital FreeNet


From: ai474@freenet.carleton.ca (Farrell McGovern)

Chris Hand (cph@dmu.ac.uk) writes:
> 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.
> 
> 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.   :)

	But, as I said, it presumes a common set of symbols.

	To a non-english speaker, the above paragraph has almost zero
information content.

	But give a non-english speaker a graphical virtual reality, and
they will be able to work it right away, since there is a great deal of
information in it. Text is only efficent when it is shorthand a commn set
of symbols...

	Consider the following paragraph.

	"L-boy got seemingly verbalberbage of the copy because the twain
driver was fubared by a wrong lun on the hp. So he had to pull up ami and
and manually put it in."

	Did you understand that, totally? Would an average office worker?
At my last job, this would be understood quite easily.

	The famous "A picture is worth a thousand words" comes to
mind...graphical representations are much easier to understand across
linguistic barriers. 

	No, conversly, a MUD player has a great deal of common language
with other MUD players, and thus with very few words, can create a virtual
world. So, we can do a fair job of VR that way..but, given a choice, a
graphical Virtual World would be much better...

ttyl
     Farrell