An image is a lonely place

Norton, Chris chrisn at Kronos.com
Wed Sep 29 17:48:01 UTC 1999


Hi Tom & Squeakers everywhere...

[Warning: the following is an opinion laden response!]

Perhaps I am only addressing a fraction of what you wrote; I love science
fiction, so forgive me if I go a bit off subject.  :-)

I really enjoyed the book "Snow Crash" (author: Neal Stephenson), and in
particular, the whole concept of a Meta-verse.  But, I would argue that we
are still too far away from the concept of a replacement reality (virtual).
Yes, we could perhaps model some of the 3D features of the Meta-verse with
tools like Alice, but it would still be too hard to manipulate that universe
to make it worth the effort.

In the story, the lead character's computer tracks his eyes and fills them
with a complete view of his place in the Meta-verse.  As he moves about his
room, his avatar (his virtual simulacrum) moves as he does.  In order to
create this kind of simulation, we would need some pretty fancy hardware
that doesn't exist yet!  I think that a bio-feedback suit would also be
essential to navigation through a virtual world, as well as a "real" voice
interface with your computer.  We do have some limited voice synthesis &
voice driven software out there, but it is too primitive to be truly
practical in the way that it is used in the story.

Also, I'm not sure that a stack of three dimensional representations of
BookMorphs would be a particularly useful idea.  We have libraries full of
actual books in the physical universe, but we have to use card catalogues
and computer indexes to find the books.  A virtual rendering of a pile of
books would be just as messy as a real pile of books.

Don't get me wrong... From a fun & games perspective, I think a Meta-verse
would be great!  But from a practical, bang for your buck perspective, I'm
not sold on the utility of Virtual Reality as a replacement of my office,
library, etc.

Now if we could create a voice operated Swiki, that might be an improvement
in a useful direction!  We would truly have a "chat" room!

---==> Chris





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