From: good@baviki.enet.dec.com
Subject: Re: Call for discussion
Date: 15 Jun 90 13:00:34 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation



Mike,

Your questions are key to the research in multi-sensory I/O that we
are doing.  Here are a few ideas about how to answer them:

1) Current virtual-worlds demonstrations emphasize applications that have
obvious correlations to physical models.  For many people, these are the 
easiest applications to start with.  So areas like design (of cars, computers,
buildings, etc.) and molecular modeling have attracted much of the
industrial interest so far.

2) The people who will be using the technology in their work should
be guiding its development.  We're working with a couple of our customers
to develop scenarios of what "a day in the life" of these people would be like
in the future, with more advanced virtual-worlds technology available.  There
are lots of participatory design techniques available for this type of work.
Some are described in the CHI '90 conference on Computer-Human
Interaction held in Seattle this spring.  Other sources of ideas are
Pelle Ehn's book
"Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts" and the latest issue of the 
journal "Human-Computer Interaction", which contains a single article on
the Scandinavian approach to computer system design.  The latter two are
available from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in Hillsdale, New Jersey, USA.

3) You don't have to implement a full-fledged virtual-worlds system in order
to study these questions!  You can mock it up using videotape, cardboard,
and foam core, for instance.  Early in the 80's, people investigated the
potential of natural-language like command-line interfaces by having a 
"person behind the computer" interpret what people typed at the keyboard.
Ehn investigated what it would be like to use full-screen workstations for
newspaper layout years before they became affordable and available in
Scandinavia.  Gayle Curtis and Laurie Vertelney gave a wonderful tutorial at
CHI '90 on "Storyboards and Sketch Prototypes for Rapid Interface
Visualization" which has lots of ideas for these types of mock-ups.

Michael Good

Good@Baviki.Enet.Dec.Com