From: wjbaird@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Warren Baird)
Subject: Re: Virtual Reality, Helmets, and Gloves
Date: 10 Apr 91 02:48:08 GMT
Organization: University of Waterloo



In article <1991Apr4.021135.12258@milton.u.washington.edu> frerichs@ux1.cso.uiuc
.edu (David J Frerichs) writes:
>
>I think that the most important aspect of VR (IMHO), complete replacement
>of a sensory modality, visual in this case, is missing in a non-helmet/boom
>system. 

I'll have to disagree with this statement.  Perhaps my definition of VR
is different from yours (I saw a thread about that a while back...
Was anything concrete decided??), but I personally believe that any 
general VR system designed should function almost independantly of the
display used.  

Whatever is in the world generated by the VR system could be displayed
just as well on a flat screen as through a head mounted stero display.
Navigation would be more complicated, but the same concepts hold.


> ... but floating an object in space in front of your monitor
>is not creating a virtual-world, even if it is interactive.  

Is this the consensus of the 'group mind'??  It seems to me that a VW
is a system that provides interaction with and between the objects in
the system, in a matter similar to the real world.

Does the display-type really come into the definition of a VW?
(Sorry if this is a dead topic... I didn't follow the definition of VR
thread when it came up last...)

>[dfRERICHS
> University of Illinois, Urbana         Designing systems that work...
> Dept. of Computer Engineering          Consumer VR. Networked VR.
> IEEE/SigGraph                            _    _    _
> frerichs@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu              _/_\__/_\__/_\_
> frerichs@well.sf.ca.us                  \_/  \_/  \_/                     ]


-- 
         Warren Baird, 2A Co-op Math Computer Science, U(Waterloo)
 wjbaird@dahlia.uwaterloo.ca ...utzoo!watmath.uwaterloo.edu!dahlia!wjbaird
            An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.