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From: cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Sensory Modalities (was Re: Musical Virtual Worlds)
Message-ID: <12146@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 90 18:11:36 GMT
References: <1990Nov13.213038.27046@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> <11370@milton.u.washington
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In article <12072@milton.u.washington.edu> mukesh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Mukesh Pate
l) writes:
>
>
>In article <1990Nov20.205922.12716@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> garry@cs-sun-fsc.cpsc.ucal
g
>ary.ca (Garry Beirne) writes:
>>
>>> Bringing this discussion back to VR, I think that the focus of VR has
>>> been on the visual modality because vision is a more information-rich
>>> domain than sound.  Sound is a one-dimensional medium while vision is
>>> two-dimensional (two-and-a-half-dimensional for stereo vision).  
>>
>>Arguments have been made that vision is *NOT* more information-rich
>>than sound.  Sound is *definitely NOT* one-dimensional.  The problem,
>>is too many people *believe* that sound is less important than images
>>because of our cultural bias towards a greater conciousness of image.
>
>Yes but why is there a cultural bias in the first place.  If you dont
>attempt to answer that question than the above is no more than a trivial
>restatement of the obvious.

>>But, that raises the question of what images are NOT symbolic ?  How
>>do we extract meaning if we don't perform some kind of interpretation? 
>>This is, I expect, a well discussed topic in the visual arts.  

This thread is starting to set off my bullfudge meter.  Look.  The bandwidth
of the optic nerve has been estimated at 1 Mb/s - and this has already been
highly compressed by the retina.  (I am not an expert here, and I think this
figure is slightly low - can anyone correct me?)  Perfect sound can be
duplicated by 16-bit samples at 44Khz.  This is 44,000 * 16= 704Kb/s,
_uncompressed_.  So by any quantitative standard, vision has greater
bandwidth than sound.

If sound had a greater bandwidth than vision, we'd all have headphones on
our computers instead of monitors.  Sound can convey some information that
is unconveyable visually (eg voice tone); vision can convey information that
sound cannot.  But if you want to start comparing the two quantitatively,
you'd better talk in quantitative terms.

Curtis

"I tried living in the real world
 Instead of a shell
 But I was bored before I even began." - The Smiths


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