From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson)
Subject: Re: Computerized Reality: Better than VR
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 1991 01:40:08 GMT
Organization: HIT Lab, Seattle



This is a valuable thread, and one of great moment.

Clearly, corporate approaches to the "information environment" challenge
are breaking a bit along theoretical lines, which should ensure sufficient
energy to test both the embodied virtuality and virtual worlds theorems.
I hope we are around to see the Grand Compromise, which I suspect lurks
somewhere in the latter years of this decade.

For my Ph.D. thesis, I proposed to my committees (two of them, at two
different schools -- so you can see how that went over) -- to begin
defining the metrics of information space.  We keep monkeying with this
environmental factor without getting much closer to understanding its
components and the relationships among them.  Media ecology and informa-
tion ecology, subfields within the field of communications studies, are
of little help; they usually deal with the organizational and societal
aspects of broadcasting or other specific media.  But what about an
holistic vision?

If anyone wants to take up a new thread that lays out some of the sign-
posts for this endeavor, if not yet the paths themselves, it would be
very useful for designers of the various forms of virtuality.

Bob Jacobson
Moderator