From: brucec@phoebus.labs.tek.com (Bruce Cohen)
Subject: Re: VR (mis)-defined (was: VR defined)
Date: 31 Oct 91 18:41:11 GMT
Organization: Computer Research Lab, Tektronix Inc.



In article <1991Oct31.024551.366@milton.u.washington.edu> strength@milton.u.
washington.edu (Julian Bleecker) writes:

> Historically it seems as though there was a similar departure
> between the camera obscura and photography.  The camera obscura
> forced a removed, objective point-of-view, while the camera 
> allowed the point-of-view to be placed within the eye (the camera
> along with many new and radical dialogues on the physiology of
> vision.) The camera proposed a new level of experiential truth as
> did other mimetic techniques like cinema and video.  

I agree that this is the essence of what is new about Virtual Reality:
what's been called the "first person experience".  I've got to say I
dislike the phrase "experiential truth"; is there really any more
"truth" to this technique than others, or is it that the technique
engages the attention and concern of the audience more than previous
techniques?  I like to think of the development of more engaging media
as the search for ways to  better match the material to be presented,
whether it is a work of art, educational material, or whatever, to the
ways humans have evolved to perceive and extract meaning from the world
around them.

> VR will (again, maybe) propose an entirely new level of verisimillitude
> that could have profound implications (beyond what is expected from
> evolutionary expectations of a new technology being "better" than
> the previous).
> 
> My point is that this new verisimillitude will be the entirely
> new aspect of VR - not just the fact that an amalgam of basically
> old technology makes a new technology.  The sum is greater then the
> collection of the parts.

For the same reason, I object to the term "versimilitude", though I've
used it myself in this context before.  After realizing that much of the
sophisticated world design will bear no direct resemblance to any
current consensual reality, and that there will be a large set of
ethical and moral issues revolving around the "truth", "correctness"
political or otherwise, or fidelity to the "real world" of these
designs, I've decided that using any term which implies a judgement in
respect to these qualities is probably asking for unnecessary
controversy.  So I've come to prefer the terms "first-person", and
"highly reactive" as qualities of the medium and the experience, and
"engaging" as a quality of the design that the medium expresses.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
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