From: fortony@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Felix Sebastian Ortony)
Subject: Re: Imagination vs. VR (was Re: More on MUDs etc.)
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1991 21:26:49 GMT
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL


brucec@phoebus.labs.tek.com (Bruce Cohen) writes:
>I think interactivity is a separate issue, although I would agree that
>interactivity tends to make a medium more "hot".  But VR has an
>inherently different style of interactivity from that of a book.  A
>reader interacts with a book in a somewhat solipsistic fashion: she
>incrementally builds a model of the book in her head as she reads, based
>on her reading so far, her own experiences, and models she's built of books
>she's read previously.  As she reads, she carries on a dialog with that
>model, refining the model when it fails to match the book (or not; often
>a reader's dissatisfaction with a book is the result of dissonance
>between it and the model in which the book suffers).  The model is the
>creation of the reader; the author of the book doesn't get a chance to
>review it and suggest changes.  This isn't necessarily bad; it's just a
>constraint of the textual medium that a writer has to recognize.

This is a very interesting point.  However, in discussions of virtual
reality, I don't see the meta-involvement of the VR author with the
user coming into play.  Indeed, once a VR has been 'done', I imagine
that it's very difficult to alter its facets; how do you add an arm
to a virtual robot without spending hours at the terminal typing in
new data?  How do you specify that the floor creaks here and there
without defining data objects, putting them at specified coordinates,
and all that?  I don't think VR is any more author-user interactive
than books.  In fact, I think it's less so.  When I write short fiction,
I take it to my workshop.  The others read it, comment on it, perhaps
even scribble on the copies and give them back to me.  Don't make the
mistake of believing books are immutable, or that language results in
solid forms.

>VR, on the other hand, at least offers the possibility of a more
>interactive style of internal model building.  Interactivity is there,
>unlike the more passive, "cooler", media like television, because the VR
>user is forced to build up a model of the world he finds himself in,
>just in order to continue to interact with the world.  In addition, the
>user's actions can modify the world, and the way the world reacts to
>these actions can further inform the user's model of it.  The author of
>the VR world can plan its reactions so that it actively conducts a
>dialog with the user's model (or at least what the VR system can deduce
>about it); much more actively than a book can.

I don't agree.  It's flashier to *do* "You open the door and see clouds.
Looking down, you see the face of the building disappear into infinity;
you reel..." than to say it, but both are active challenges to possibly
preconceived ideas.   Along similar lines, the works of Philip K. Dick
or James Joyce are frequently as internally-modifiable as anything I
can name.  Is this all a dream?  What does he mean by this?  Who's the
victim, who's the master?  Maybe I'm missing the point, could you provide
examples?

>Glad you put quotes around "passive" there.  It's humbling for an artist
>to see just how active a person can be when viewing any work, and how
>much can be gotten from a work that the artist never knew about or
>intended.  On the other hand, the more degrees of freedom are available
>in the viewing, the more can be gotten.  Position and view orientation
>are nowhere near as variable in viewing a painting as a sculpture;
>listening or reading excerpts works with music or writing but isn't as
>useful with static visual media.  VR can offer additional dimensions to
>both the author and the audience.

Well said.  I still maintain that the imagination engendered by literature
exceeds the imagination engendered by VR, however, mostly because of the
far-larger range of degrees of freedom available in language and belief
about meaning.  "The cat was huge" will always have more user-suppliable
potential and 'heat', in my opinion, than a picture of a big kitty.

>--
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Speaker-to-managers, aka
>Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab        email: brucec@crl.labs.tek.com
>Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc.                phone: (503)627-5241
>M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR  97077