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From: brucec%phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Sensory Modalities (was Re: Musical Virtual Worlds)
Message-ID: <13169@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 17 Dec 90 19:40:10 GMT
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In article <12954@milton.u.washington.edu> abvax!iccgcc.decnet.ab.com!herrickd@u
unet.UU.NET (daniel lance herrick) writes:
> The visual media are in some ways limiting.  The best presentation of
> this idea that I have read:
> 
> When the radio announcer said, "... and a fiery horse with the speed
> of light ....", children all over America saw a fiery horse with the
> speed of light.
> 
> When the television announcer said, "... and a fiery horse with the
> speed of light ....", we saw this silly guy in a mask on a gray
> horse (television was monochrome, back then).
> 
> There was a lot more communication moving through the audio only
> channel than moves through the audio-video channel.  But it was
> more work to receive that communication because it communicated
> by stimulating the receiver to do great inventive work, while
> the current channel does everything for the observer.

This is the distinguishing character of a *symbolic* medium, that it can
encode a great deal of information in a few symbols, as long as the
symbols' meanings are agreed upon by both sender and receiver.  As several
people have already said in this thread, that doesn't support the original
contention that *audio* has more information content than video, or sound
more than sight (make whatever distinctions you want here).

Symbols can be transmitted via any medium: the same words could have been
sent by close-captioning rather than an announcer's voice; if there were no
picture, the impact would have been roughly the same as the radio
transmission (minus the additional information of the emotional stress and
the musical background in the audio).  It's important in this discussion to
differentiate between information being explicitly transmitted to one
human (directly by a human or indirectly through some recorded medium), and
information being gathered by a human from an environment.  This is the
difference between getting information by reading a book and by searching a
database.

The transmission of explicit information is the signature of most existing
communication media, from books to television.  VR and its enabling
technologies make the gathering of information from pre-established (and
possibly ever-changing) environments a practical alternative to direct
media.  The purpose of providing many sensory modes simultaneously is to
give the "reader" of a VR environment as many clues as possible in finding
and understanding the information stored there, and to make the access easy
for people with different kinds of knowledge-retaining mechanisms (that is,
to help both people with predominantly visual memories and those with
auditory memories).  These clues are not provided by symbolic
communication, but by sensory stimuli like the image of a chair, the sound
of a sigh, the touch of a hand.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker-to-managers, aka
Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab        email: brucec@tekchips.labs.tek.com
Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc.                phone: (503)627-5241
M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR  97077