Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!davidr@ux5.lbl.gov
From: davidr@ux5.lbl.gov (David Robertson)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: re: Authors of cyberspacish Fiction
Message-ID: <8080@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 25 Sep 90 00:50:05 GMT
Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Lines: 44
Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu



F. Randall Farmer brings up Vernor Vinge as an author besides
William Gibson who has written a fictional account of virtual reality.
Another author is Roger Zelazny, who wrote The
Dream Master, first as a magazine serial in 1964 and then in
book form in 1966.

Speculation follows regarding some ideas in The Dream Master
that might be relevant to virtual reality:

(1)  Picking up subtle muscular cues to guide what Zelazny calls
the Shaping, giving the sense of effortless control which
is probably behind some of the desire to have an EEG interface.

(2)  Creating a world while in a dream- or trance-like state.  Vinge writes
about much the same thing, except that his has the advantage
of being built for more than 2.  An aside:  the most vivid
(private) virtual realities I have experienced have been lucid dreams,
which interestingly enough are written about in
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming,
by Stephen LaBerge and the moderator of this newsgroup.

While the last paragraph is somewhat fanciful as far as providing
gist for implementing a virtual reality, it does bring
up the issue that it may not be necessary to brute force all
the details of a virtual reality if the imagination is brought
into play.  Much the same thing is said by Kent Paul Dolan:
(message id <7988@milton.u.washington.edu>)

>To generalize, don't overdesign the early systems to provide every possible
>sensory input. Start by trusting the body/memory/imagination/wishful
>thinking to provide the parts that are hard to simulate if you only do the
>easy ones well.

David Robertson
dwrobertson@lbl.gov

*******************************************************************
``What we call reality consists of a few iron posts of observation
between which we fill in by an elaborate papier-mache' construction
of imagination and theory.''  John Wheeler, quoted in Howard
Resnikoff, The Illusion of Reality. 
*******************************************************************