Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!milton!rkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu From: rkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (Robert Kelly) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: The VR Entertainment Industry Summary: long Message-ID: <1990Jul26.171516.21252@ariel.unm.edu> Date: 26 Jul 90 17:15:16 GMT References: <9007160320.AA21126@aic.hrl.hac.com> Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Lines: 155 Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu Yes, the entertainment application opf VR is incredible, but I think the most valuable is going to in the stages of "User Friendly" computers. Look at MacIntoshes and their appeal to persons who "dont understand" computers, or those who think they are "computer illiterate." If you give them a headset (goggles) where the icons of a word processor and a music program is done, they will be equivalently "PHYSICALLY" enhanced to the point where they can play a keyboard like Mozart or type faster than the best secretary. Speakerphones that will allow a person to talk and type (dictaphones, we have them now, but technology will be enhanced). Of course - in comparison to MacIntoshes - what is the reason for MacIntoshes? A product that will sell. If we are basing the reason why they sell is easiness, then VR will be infinitely easier. If we base it on appearance and output, then VR will have to develop a form of output that rivals MacIntoshes. However, I do not think that this is the case. "User Friendly" has a connotation that computers are not "friendly." There is a large fear of the machine that exists in our society. Now, if a user is afraid of typing on a keyboard - a rather easy fear to overcome - then he/she will be a LOT more afraid of "Here, put on these goggles and this dataglove and sit in this chair... Yep, you look like Darth Vader." Will a user friendly VR comp sell? I don't think so. Not until mankind learns to overcome fears easier. But as entertainment? Quite possibly. Recently, a trend at this school is to get an account so you can play games. Of course, the system then responded by restricting access to these games. But they did not restrict access to Forum, ReadNews and IRC. These are User Talk channels that allow people to communicate from all across the world. This can also include tinyTalk, MUD, and similar sites. If you haven't seen a trend to "fantasy" environments over Virtual Reality, try out any one of these sites, like Islandia or MongoMud, where users _create_ where they want to be. In Virtual Reality, Users could create their own Environament without having to read it. Literally Cyberspace. Telnet in, walk to an unused portion of diskspace and create. And if you don't like where you are, uncreate. Three dimensions would be easy to simulate in VR goggles and it doesn't have to be blue corridors with shimmering neon signs. Digitize your favorite picture and POOF it is there. Throw it through a 3-d emulator and POOF your 2-d picture is brought into a near-life quality. Run the preprogrammed tape sounds and you have got anything from birds to trucks to funky electronic music. The hallucinatory experience capable here is incredible... what happens when we could make what we want, when we want it. It wouldn't be exactly REAL, but neither is TV and in TV, all you do is SIT there. Here you can interact without moving a muscle. And we sit in front of a TV on the average of eight to twelve hours a day... for the Average American, of course. But we are having more "user interface" (heh - i love that word) via computers. It is easier... You dont have to worry about what you look like, you don't have to dress up. Even if you 300 lbs, you don't need to worry about your SELF. VR can take this one further. Instead of programming what you really look like in a VR "digitizer" you can create one. You can literally design what you look like on a VR screen. And the limits of looking like anyone thing can also change. One day you could be the Duke, with a gun and hat, the next, a dog, the next a large 2-dimensional pyramid with an eye in the center. Now, _THAT_ is entertainment. :-) Brian Yamauchi writes: >Interactive entertainment (video games) is currently at the stage of >the penny arcade "movie" viewers of long ago. I wonder whether Edison >could have imagined Hollywood movies with $60,000,000 budgets (i.e. >Die Hard 2) and THX sound systems. This is speculative, but I think he would be quite pleased with what we have been creating in the last decade of technology. But that is neither here nor there... But he did have foresite that his invention would be used around the world (ref. Memoirs, dont remember the specific quote.) and knew that many people would want his invention. Here, on the edge of Virtual Reality, the information we are sharing - along with the ideas that were are sharing (user interface) are the most important. One of the big drives behind VR is the "CyberPunk" Literary movement. And though there is a lot of schlock being published about this, there is even more people who are becoming used to the idea that Cybernetics is going to be possible. If we say that CyberPunk is the "imaginative" side to VR, and VR is is - excuse the pun - the reality, then we are joining two sides of human stylistic thinking to create a product -whether it be called "Virtual Reality" or Cyberspace. William Gibson - author of Neuromancer and Count Zero - is ALREADY making millions on the VR as an entertainment media. And since his is just the written concept of it, there is more money to be had by entreprenuring minds. >Personally, I believe that in 20-30 years the VR entertainment >industry is going to make both the movie and TV industries look like >small potatoes -- if they're still around at all. We have yet - in the length of humankind - had a media of idea exchange totally disappear. Pictures, Speech, Written Text, and Radio have been going strong since their beginnings. Yes, in America, we are going to be facing a problem of illiteracy in the near future - supposedly one third of our nation will be illiterate by the year 2000. Even worse, we are going to provide people with a medium that doesn't require them to read - Virtual Reality, taken to the logical extreme, allows people to send mail VERBALLY like a telephone - and if we can get our legal acts together - documentated just like any other written/published media. Our very ideas will become published as soon as we type them into our computers and hit the save button. TV, I feel wont disappear - a VR setup will be bigger than the normal entertainment area of a house for quite some time. TV's will probably decrease in use - like books - and importance but not removed altogether. The will probably become LED readouts a la 2001: A Space Oddessy. Handy, portable, like a Walkman radio already has. As for twenty or thirty years to make VR an Entertainment Industry, I feel that is an underestimate of the human race, technology is growing exponentially. At the beginning of this century, communication was impossible to span the globe. Now we circumnavigate it in mere minutes. A television in the late fifties is nothing compared to the fact that we can take a photograph and reproduce it onto a screen in about eight seconds. An announcement on the radio is expected to be able to reach 50,000 to 100,000 people simultaneously in a large city on any one station. How many people are going reading this article alone? VR is yet another frontier that we are going to walk. And for a while, the rich will have it. Then many will have it. Then all will have access to it. Bob's Trickle Down Theory of Technology.... Hey Diddle, Diddle, The Cat and the Fiddle, And the cow blew up on the launch pad... From the Complete Guide to Cows ______________________________________________________________________ rkelly@carina.unm.edu