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From: danorman@UCSD.EDU (Donald A Norman-UCSD Cog Sci Dept)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Can displays be "too real"?
Message-ID: <9682@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 22 Oct 90 06:04:23 GMT
References: <9638@milton.u.washington.edu>
Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science
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Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu


In article <9638@milton.u.washington.edu> dmark@acsu.buffalo.edu (David
Mark) writes:

^Has the "Virtual Reality" (VR) community addressed the issue of when something
^might be "too real"?

^...  a road map is better for finding one's way around
^in a city than would be an airphoto, even an airphoto with street names
^overlain.  The utility of the road map in such situations stems from the
^fact that it is a *selective* representation of reality.  Roads are emphasized
^and most other features are suppressed.  In fact, it may be claimed that
^this selection, symbolization, and simplification is the essence of
^cartography.
^

This is a critical point.  The nice thing about a virtual or artificial
reality is that it can be better than real: reality is harder to deal with
than pre-processed information, especially symbolic pointers, line
drawings, and cartoons.

In a virtual reality, wouldn't it be nice if the path one was trying to
follow were shown as a yellow dashed line (perhaps flashing), and if the
items that could be perceived along the way had nametags or special
symbology associated with them.  But as Mark points out, this is stilt hard
to perceive (in part, i believe because of the clutter and because real
objects and real photos do not have boundaries and contours clearly
visible).  If I need to find my way, why not let me switch the perception
of a rich, three-dimensional world, to a preprocessed, three-dimensional
cartographic representation: 3D maps aren't possible today, but they could
be with VR technology, one that would even show me my own position on the
map.  (actually, 3D maps do exist as perspective drawings of cities and
mountains.  But note that in these drawings, one has to distort the scene
to make it more effective, especially the vertical dimension, and sometimes
moving items around so as to make the things behind them visible.

The exciting part about virtual or artificial realities is that they could
have processing aids associated with them -- cognitive artifacts, if you
will -- so that these artificial realities might be easier to perceive and
deal with than true realities.
      
Don Norman                                     INTERNET:  dnorman@ucsd.edu
Department of Cognitive Science D-015          BITNET:    dnorman@ucsd
University of California, San Diego            AppleLink: dnorman
La Jolla, California 92093 USA                 FAX:       (619) 534-1128