Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!usc!ucsd!ogicse!milton!xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: Reading text in virtual reality? Message-ID: <1990Aug16.134553.29297@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 16 Aug 90 13:45:53 GMT References: <25797@cs.yale.edu> Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu Organization: SF Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 33 Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu jellinghaus-robert@CS.YALE.EDU (Rob Jellinghaus) writes: > >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_. This brought to mind another human ability, nearly magic, that will be of _crucial_ experience for navigating virtual reality, and that seems to have been neglected as yet. This is the "cocktail party" phenomenon: in a crowd of fifty conversations, our ears can somehow pick out the one of interest to us, and focus on it to the exclusion of all others. Two items of research interest 1) how do we do it; i.e., what are the parts of the signal crucial to make this work, so that our virtual reality generator can be designed to present them to us; and 2) how do we indicate our new focus of attention to our virtual reality interface, so that we may use it for navigation, when at present it is all done "in our heads". The application is obvious: one can navigate a database along "fifty" simultaneous threads until the one of interest is isolated, then branch "fifty" times again to narrow the focus. This should be much faster than a visual interface to textual/verbal information, on a guess, if it can be replicated from the real world into the virtual reality world. Besides, isn't that how it's done in all the sexy cyberpunk stories? ;-) Kent, the man from xanth.