From: smoliar@iss.nus.sg (stephen smoliar) Subject: Re: More on MUDs (Was Re: VR Worlds better than Reality) (LONG) Date: Fri, 9 Aug 91 09:55:33 SST In article <1991Aug7.215238.23576@milton.u.washington.edu> fortony@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Felix Sebastian Ortony) writes: >I think MUDs work now. Many MUDs have poorly written worlds, but as anyone >who's gotten absorbed in a good horror story can tell you, good, vivid writing >can be every inch as good (if not better) than the like amount of television. >In fact, that brings up a point I'm a little worried about -- is Virtual >Reality to Textual Adventure what Television is to Books? As a writer, I'm >a strong advocate of the power of imagination. This leads me to another thread which I think is worth pursuing, which is the potential value of Virtual Reality in different aspects of education. One of the more interesting moments of the CPSR panel discussion (as I saw it on the tape provided by CPSR) involved the "testimony" of a psychologist who had been a staunch advocate of experiential learning but confessed to being thoroughly put off by Bill Bricken's "visions" of Virtual Reality. One of the problems with this discussion is trying to figure out where Virtual Reality fits in, if at all. Flight simulators already provide experiential learning for a very important training task. Do they deserve to now be incorporated in the Virtual Reality camp; or are they not "real" enough? One of the panel topics involved the potential application of Virtual Reality for surgery training on the grounds that "virtual cadavers" are more "cost-effective" than real ones. (I'm sure they would be.) My question is how close to reality do you have to get for effective training? Do you want to simulate smell? (The would-be surgeon has to get used to it sooner or later.) How about the fact that the interior of the body is generally slimy and resistant to manipulation of any sort? Making the cut you want to make is not as easy as doing cut-and-paste with pieces of paper on a drawing board. I realize that I may be reducing the matter to absurdity, but there is still an important lesson here. If we want to talk about using Virtual Reality for educational purposes, we need to hear from more educators and fewer Virtual Reality "visionaries." The CPSR panel was sort of a bad omen if the only member of the audience with a serious commitment to education who bothered to speak up did so on a negative position. A few weeks ago I posted another article about this panel discussion, citing Rob Kling's admirable cautionary remarks. My topic then was about the flourishing of misconceptions about artificial intelligence and the danger of Virtual Reality going the same way. In artificial intelligence the problem lay in part with highly vocal visionaries who preferred to speak in broad generalities rather than looking at relatively narrow slices of life and asking what contribution could be made there. I would rather hear a concrete proposal from one educator of a critical need which might be met by Virtual Reality than from a chorus of visionaries, most of whom cannot express themselves anywhere near as well as a good science fiction writer. Let me now return to Felix's initial praise of the imagination. Perhaps I am becoming too much of a conservative pessimist, but I continue to believe that there is no substitute for books. One of the most important things you can bring with you from a good education is the discovery that books are NOT A PASSIVE EXPERIENCE. Sitting and reading a book is only a part of what that book is good for. A book only comes to life when you RETURN to it with the intention of CONSULTING it for some goal or another (even if the goal is to revive a pleasant memory associate with a poem you once read). Some of this consultation is driven by what we may call "imaginative reading." That is, a book is not simply a repository of facts but a trigger for our own thoughts. Consulting the book may be more a matter of seeking out that trigger again than one of recalling the current population of Tibet. (Isn't that right, Agent Cooper?) Given this perspective on what books are and how we use them, I believe it is valid to ask what sorts of new technologies can fill such massive and flexible shoes. We certainly do not yet have such ready powers of consultation in the world of multimedia. (Anyone who ever took a music appreciation class probably remembers the teacher scratching the needle on the surface of the record while trying to find just the right passage to play for the class.) Hypermedia promises us all the links to get what we need; but "authoring," the technique of making sure all those links are available, remains a black art and there are still too many stacks out there which are essentially linear with only a few spurs (no more sophisticated than footnotes in a book). Do we really expect Virtual Reality to be an improvement on books which works this time? If so, then what will it be about Virtual Reality which will give us a better handle on consultation than we have had thus far with the equally promising technologies of multimedia and hypermedia? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen W. Smoliar; Institute of Systems Science National University of Singapore; Heng Mui Keng Terrace Kent Ridge, SINGAPORE 0511 smoliar%iss.nus.sg@nuscc.nus.sg