From: "Raghu Kolli" Subject: Designing virtual worlds Date: Mon, 21 Oct 91 15:46 MET Enter us! The media folks from design schools. No, we ain't gonna call ourselves designers any more. There are far too many by that title... graphic designers, software designers, industrial designers, engineering designers...and on. Well, when we are dealing with new stuff, guess we could do with some new names as well (Uh, like cyberspace, cybernauts!). So here is one: VIRTUALIZER. A 'Virtualizer' is the bloke who dreams, visualizes and hallucinates multi-sensory images (actually visual, audio and tactile to start with) and creates them(uh, where else ?) in the cyberspace, hopefully with something better than AutoCAD in the near future. Recently, we had a one day symposium here in Holland at the Delft University on VR. There was Warren Robinett from UNC, Eric G from sense8 and others. I also saw the demo of Sense8 WorldKit. After talking to all those who created the first samples of 'worlds', I now have the impression that AutoCAD is the de-facto tool, the painter's brush, the architect's board, the sculptor's chisel to a Virtualizer. WorldKit starts by reading a DXF file but helps in adding textures. While, all the whiz kids are chewing their pens (or wearing out their mouses, whatever) figuring out compressions, polygons, head sets and gloves, is somebody working on some neat tools to make some neat images so we creative lot don't have to cram 200 keyboard commands and know 400 icons? What I mean is, are we gonna have a HyperCard or something where Virtualizers can neatly figure the graphics, sound and tactile responses? If there is someone 'out there' better off than I am, please give me me a hand ! Raghu Kolli Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering Delft University of Technology