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From: decwrl!well.sf.ca.us!well!hlr@uunet.UU.NET (Howard Rheingold)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Can displays be "too real"?
Message-ID: <9956@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 90 16:04:17 GMT
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danorman@UCSD.EDU (Donald A Norman-UCSD Cog Sci Dept) writes:



>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.  


Stephen Ellis at NASA explained this to me in terms of the difference
between a visual *display* and a visual *instrument.* That is, when
you are dealing with docking maneuvers in 3 space, for example, and
the path the pilot wants to see is in essence a virtual path that
takes into account present trajectory, burn length, movement of other
objects, etc., what you need is a display that is designed
specifically to distort information in order to help the pilot make
judgements. In aviation, truth might be more dangerous than a
representation that is designed to take human perceptions into account
(humans, for example, tend to make certain mistakes in judging azimuth
with their unaided visual perceptions -- a display that includes a
certain amount of distortion in these instances might lead to better
judgements by the human pilot).


These issues, and other perceptual issues relevant to VR, are
discussed in "Spatial Displays and Spatial Instruments," proceedings
of a conference sponsored by NASA, held at Asilomar in 1987. The NASA
publication number is NASA CP-10032