Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!milton!schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu From: schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: The VR Entertainment Industry Message-ID: Date: 31 Jul 90 03:02:23 GMT References: <9007160320.AA21126@aic.hrl.hac.com> <1990Jul26.171516.21252@ariel.unm.edu> Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu Lines: 67 Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu rkelly%hydra.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (Robert Kelly) writes: [lots of good stuff deleted] >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. [...] >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. :-) [...] I think we have to be very careful to distinguish two aspects of VR: on one hand there's the drive to provide artificial sensory input that is as realistic as possible and covers as many modalities as possible, on the other there's the exciting aspect of interactive VR, ie. the viewer actively influencing his experience. Of course the ultimate goal of simulating Reality (TM) requires both these aspects; however, at present they are quite distinct, and they will remain so for quite a while because each presents enormous technical challenges, and a convincing synthesis outside some very narrow scope (such as fingering virtual protein molecules) is simply way beyond present technology. Now ask yourself where the entertainment giants will put their money. Look at DisneyWorld, where you pay many $$ to watch 3-D surround-sound clips that cost huge amounts of $$ to produce. The average couch potato will be per- fectly happy (and quite willing to shell out lots of money) to passively con- sume "Die Hard XIV" on a future home entertainment unit with similar powers. Where is the money in going through all the additional trouble of making entertainment interactive? If people would be willing to pay for it, we'd have somewhat interactive TV (in low-res 2-D and with poor sound quality) now. Look at TinyMUDs, the most interactive (although text-only) entertainment VR around today. Recently, the overwhelming majority of TinyMUD players expressed outrage at the thought of having to pay for their entertainment. Given that to most humans any improvement in sensory reality of passive entertainment is far more attractive (and addictive) than an equally hard improvement in the degree of interaction possible, I am afraid we will go through a long phase of "couch potatoes' paradise" before seeing widespread use of anything like the kind of VR Robert Kelly describes. -- Nici Schraudolph, C-014 nschraudolph@ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego nschraudolph@ucsd.bitnet La Jolla, CA 92093 ...!ucsd!nschraudolph