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From: jellinghaus-robert@CS.YALE.EDU (Rob Jellinghaus)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Reading text in virtual reality?
Message-ID: <25797@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 13 Aug 90 02:26:51 GMT
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The "office of the future" concept in virtual reality has been widely
discussed--put on your goggles and bang you're in the office.  But one
problem is going to have to be solved, and solved well, before the
virtual office exists:  the technology will have to support virtual
documents that you can _read_.

Consider the problems in rendering a screen, or a page, of text.  Not
only must the "eyephone" screens possess high enough resolution to let
people read virtual documents comfortably, for hours, but one must be
able to pick up virtual screens, move around them, etc., which means
text rendering must be very fast and very accurate.

Has anyone done any work on smooth, realistic rotation of text?  Almost
all the 3D graphics stuff I've ever seen specializes in blitting
lots of polygons with good shading effects, which doesn't seem very 
applicable to the special problems text presents.

Also, has anyone noticed the parallels between the discussions we've
been having here about virtual space and navigation therein, and the
work that's been done on hypertext information spaces?  In both contexts
there is a lot of stuff in the world, and you need to be able to know
where you are and where you want to be.  Maybe the two fields will inter-
breed at some proximate date.


-- 
Rob Jellinghaus                | "Next time you see a lie being spread or a
jellinghaus-robert@CS.Yale.EDU |  bad decision being made out of sheer ignor-
ROBERTJ@{yalecs,yalevm}.BITNET |  ance, pause, and think of hypertext."
{everyone}!decvax!yale!robertj |     -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_