Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!mcdchg!laidbak!ism.isc.com!uunet!ogicse!milton!brucec%phoebus.labs.tek.com@relay.cs.net
From: brucec%phoebus.labs.tek.com@relay.cs.net (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: The collaborative nature of VR
Message-ID: <9578@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 16:40:26 GMT
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In article <9461@milton.u.washington.edu> boulder!boulder!heuring@ncar.UCAR.EDU 
(Vincent Heuring) writes:
> 
>>Buckaroo Banzai [wex@dali.pws.bull.com] writes:
>>>But this begs the question.  If the objects in the room don't shout at you,
>>>how do you know they're there?
>>>How do you know what you can do with 
>>>them?
> 
> 
> You look around.  If you percieve an object, you poke it, or squeeze it,
> or try to pick it up, twist it's knobs -- you get the point. If it
> happens to be a door, you try the knob.  If it doesn't turn, you give up.
> Maybe the door has a sign on it that says 

Ok, that works in real life because there's a lot of light zipping around
the room, bouncing off things and reaching your eyes.  Now, how does the VR
interface software, running on you trusty home computer, know what's in a
room which resides on a database on a remote machine in another city?  I
think this was the sort of question that this thread of discussion started
with.

Clearly, there's some level of structure you are interested in perceiving
immediately when you enter a room, and some you want to see (and hear and
touch) only if you examine things closely.  FOr instance, you want to see a
table in the corner, but may be you don't care about (or at this distance
your virtual sight can't resolve) the detail of the wood grain in the legs
of the table.  To make perception in a virtual world anything like real
perception, that is, with variable level of detail at varying distances,
the ability to focus on specific areas while ignoring detail in others, the
interface between the world and the interface, which is the agent which
represents a user in the virtual world, must relate to the objects around
it in ways which mimic the ways we relate to the objects around us.

That's not to say that we have perceive VR exactly as we perceive RR ("real
reality" :-)).  If you like, you can change the parameters of your focus to
work like an eagle, which can resolve amazing detail on distant objects,
but trades off coarser detail on the wide field.

These issues get very interesting when you try to optimize the use of
processing power by concentrating it on the details the user is actually
looking at right now, and fudging the rest.  But that's for another thread
of discussion.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker-to-managers, aka
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