From: tim@iss.nus.sg (Tim Poston)
Subject: Re: HUMAN-FACTORS: Immersion Studies
Date: 10 Oct 1996 08:37:52 GMT
Organization: Institute Of Systems Science, NUS



Peter Rothman (prothman@metatools.com) wrote:

: The question is, in my mind, the following:

: 	Is virtual reality more like the telegraph or the telephone?

: While both of these technologies accomplish similar purposes, and both
: have had tremendous cultural/social/historical importance, only one
: (the telephone) has broadly affected the way millions of people live
: their everyday lives.  No, there never was a "personal telegraph"
: although technologically speaking there could have been one.  

Not while it depended on skilled operators who could use Morse Code
fast, there couldn't.  The technology asked too much of the user.  But
"never was"?  What is e-mail but a `personal telegraph'?  In many ways
preferable to voice phone (asynchrony is often convenient), and even
to voice mail.

: The
: reasons for the failure of the telegraph to colonize people's lives in
: the same way as the telephone (98% of American homes have telephones)
: have little to do with the technical feasibility of a universal
: telegraph system, but rather the desirability of the alternatives.

Now that e-mail, the easy-use personal telegraph, has arrived, it's
colonizing explosively.  It's desirable, all right.

: Is VR destined to follow the path of the telegraph or the telephone?

Yes.

It will have highly skilled uses (neurosurgical simulation is not much
fun if you don't know your amygdala from your hippocampus), and highly
demotic ones, where the only skill required is to keep the trigger
pressed down.

And everything in between.

____________________________________________________________________________
Tim Poston    Institute of Systems Science, National University of Singapore
            Ask not what your time-zone can do for you:
              ask what you can do for your time-zone.

tim@iss.nus.sg