From: ullmer@opusc.csd.scarolina.edu (Brygg Ullmer)
Subject: Re: military information systems (LONG)
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1991 14:32:58 GMT
Organization: Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia


In <1991Jul2.073232.18314@milton.u.washington.edu> 
ISSSSM%NUSVM@UWAVM.U.WASHINGTON.EDU (Stephen Smoliar) writes:

>be destroyed for security reasons).  What I am getting at is that if an 
>officer expects to receive information on a piece of paper in the REAL world, >then he is likely to have the same expectation if you put him into an 
>analogous VIRTUAL
>world.  This need not imply that you have to simulate all the physical
>characteristics of a piece of paper which has just been torn off of a
>FAX machine;  but it probably DOES imply that one of the kinds of objects
>which is part of your virtual reality must have some of the characteristics
>of paper:  easy to hold, easy to read, can be written on, can be passed 
>around, can be folded, can be destroyed.

>user is one criterion for being appropriate.  For better or worse, the lion's
>share of our communication is achieved through text.  (If God had wanted us to
>communicate without text, He would have evolved our brains differently!)  If we
>become too engaged in trying to translated everything into buttons, knobs, and
>levers, we may run the danger of having a different widget for every sentence
>we might utter . . . meaning that our repertoire of widgets would be, for all
>intents and purposes, impossible to manage.

I will respond only to that portion of your message which deals with the
human perception of text.  I think an appropriate analogy lies in the
growing science of scientific visualization for mathematical data.  Simply
because pre-computer age mathematicians did not have the tools to visualize
multi-dimensional numeric arrays does not mean that modern visualizations
of such data are inappropriate; similarly, a past absence of the means
to transcend text in our intercommunications, information exchange, and
message passing should not in any manner, perhaps even in any context,
limit us to textual exchange in the future.  Abandoning text
to graphical representations need not mean a simple re-representation with
buttons, knobs, and entities with mechanical heritage; one of the powers of 
virtual reality is our ability to transcend physical practicality in our
representations, and raise our communications to levels beyond "real world" 
relation.

Brygg Ullmer (ullmer@bigbird.csd.scarolina.edu)