Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!cyberoid From: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: The collaborative nature of VR (was Re: Who says what to whom) Keywords: users and designers, design issues, real world attributes Message-ID: <8374@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 1 Oct 90 01:33:32 GMT Organization: Human Interface Technology Lab, Univ. of Wash., Seattle Lines: 114 Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu Date: 27 Sep 90 17:45:22 GMT References: <31304@unix.cis.pitt.edu> <7507@milton.u.washington.edu> <7801@milto < 8204@milton.u.washington.edu> Organization: Tektronix Inc. In-Reply-To: mike@x.co.uk's message of 26 Sep 90 13:55:30 GMT In article <8204@milton.u.washington.edu> mike@x.co.uk (Mike Moore) writes: > What I'm saying is that > in a VR environment if we don't want people entering a room, we don't > even tell them it's there, they just see a blank wall (or one with > pictures hung on it, or whatever) and all the hacking in the world won't > change that fact. For people we do want to allow in there is simply an > entry point, no messing around with doors just a 'transporter' machine/ > object which moves you into the chosen room/building/area/'country', > wherever you intend going. I think this is a very limited and limiting view of the way the designer and inhabitants of a virtual reality interact. The implication is that a world is finished and perfect construct, whose designer has considered every interaction possible, and knows the nature of every use to which the world will be put (or even most of them). This is not the way complex systems are introduced in the "real world". Often, particularly in systems with complex user interfaces, new interactions and new applications for the system come to light for years after the designer has gone on to other projects. I view a virtual reality as very much like an interactive fiction: a collaboration between the designer and the inhabitants. The designer puts in the basic set of objects and relationships and the inhabitants use them and build on them to make the reality suitable for their own purposes, which may or may not have been forseen by the designer. Over time, a well-designed VR would evolve as the inhabitants modified and enhanced it. In this context, the criteria for a good VR design are not completeness and fit to initial specification, as is common in systems development today, but internal consistency and extensibility. Wasn't it Stewart Brand who said, "We are become as gods, and damn well ought to learn how to be good at it"? VR makes the designer a god, and ought also to confer some divinity on the inhabitants. How else do you apprentice as a designer? > Something else I'd like to start a discussion on is the apparent necessity > we have of modelling the real world. I believe that so long as the physical > laws are apparent, there is no need to extend beyond this (of course, we > don't *really* want to accurately model somebody jumping off the golden > gate bridge!). Familiar objects are already changing in the real world, > push-button phones as opposed to rotary phones, digital display watches > as opposed to analogue display. The virtual reality would begin to alter > these 'familiar' objects in the same way that digital electronics has > already altered the real world examples I've given. I'm currently thinking > about what might be the most spectacular changes, but the 'door' argument > above is a good enough example to begin with. The key phrase here is "would begin to alter", implying gradual change. As I said above, I expect any good VR to evolve; I suspect our ideas of what to expect in a VR designed for a given application area will also evolve. Likewise, the class of kinds of model represented in our VR's will expand over time, slowly at first, perhaps, but it will happen. The change is likely to be incremental, as VR designers take a baseline "real-world" VR and modify a few attributes to make it more exotic, perhaps just removing gravity, or making light work by flowing out from the eyes to the things we want to look at. There are several reasons for starting with something as much like the real world as is practical for the level of computer power and the complexity of the I/O devices we have available: 1) The real world is the only example we have of a physically-based world all of whose perceptible attributes are related in a way which makes that world self-consistent, i.e., it's already been debugged. 2) We know how humans react to real-world stimuli to a large extent, which means we can measure how well our models match what humans expect, i.e., we have a baseline to work from. 3) There has been a *VERY* large amount of work done in simulating real-world processes and displaying real-world-like objects on computers. This gives us a head-start in building our prototype systems. AS an engineer, it's always been my policy to build on other people's work as much as possible: I represent perhaps 30 person-years of potential effort at best and there are person-millennia worth of research and development out there waiting to be used. 4) Moving from the real world to a similar VR doesn't require a large cognitive leap, or much training, on the part of the user. In the early stages of research this makes it easier for users to evaluate the quality and nature of the VR they inhabit. As a user gets more experienced, she'll be better equipped to go on to more exotic worlds. Right now, we don't have any experienced users. 5) VR designers need some experience too. Working incrementally from a robust, well-constructed, "real-world" model is a good way to get that experience. 6) I suspect we'll learn more about what we can do to modify VR models from letting the VR inhabitants mess around with the rules than any other way. That means starting with a baseline, and giving users the tools to modify it incrementally. Along the way, we have to learn how to reconcile conflicting world-views as well. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: USE THIS ADDRESS TO REPLY, REPLY-TO IN HEADER MAY BE BROKEN! Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab email: brucec@tekcrl.labs.tek.com Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc. phone: (503)627-5241 M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR 97077