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From: kilian@poplar.cray.com (Alan Kilian)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: New sensory modalities (Seeing stress)
Message-ID: <1991May6.203330.11375@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 6 May 91 18:21:09 GMT
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  Let's talk a bit about "New sensory modalities". I looked up all
of these words in the dictionary and this is my interpretation of
the phrase: 

The following is from the second college edition of the American
Heritage Dictionary Copyright 1982

New -      We all know what this means.
Sensory -  1. Of or pertaining to the senses or sensation. 
           2. Transmitting impulses from the sense organs to nerve
              centers.
Modality - (From modal which is from mode) 1a. Manner, way, or
           method of doing or acting. (Either that or 3a. Any
           of certain arrangements of the diatonic tones of
           an octave. But I doubt it)

So "New sensory modalities" can be either:
(new sensory) modalities or
New (sensory modalities).

(new sensory) modalities: This seems to be new senses. "The fifth sense"
  or some mysterious ESP thing. Directly detecting stress or magnetic
  fields would be in this class. I do not believe any of this.
  VR will not give people new senses of this class. 

New (sensory modalities): This seems to be the interpretation of
  our normal senses. So when you learn to recognize an igneous rock
  in a group of sedimentary rocks this is a New (sensory mode) 
  It's the "Detect igneous rock mode" So what's all the hype?
  We learn these things every day. (You do learn something new
  every day don't you?) VR will be able to help teach these modes.
  I am not convinced that VR can teach them better than a map
  of where the different types of rocks are but that remains to be
  seen.

Now this whole discussion started when Christopher said:

>From: seguine@girtab.usc.edu (Christopher Seguine)
>For example if one is in
>VR and is constantly given the ability to see magnetic fields,
>once he removes the goggles will his senses pick up on this
>ability and be able to see the fields in reality?

and I responded:

No. The human eye is not sensitive to normal strength magnetic fields.
Sorry.

And now people are trying to make up ways to see stress. Guess
what? It isn't going to work. YOU CANNOT SEE STRESS.

O.K. What about that science museum demonstration where they take a
piece of flexible transparent material and use a polarizer to 
illuminate it with polarized light and then you can see color changes
corresponding to the internal stress then?

Well, you are detecting colored light. It's the polarized light and
the material that detect the stress and convert it into colors for you
to interpret. VR and electrical stress detectors can do this for you
also but you are not detecting the stress.

O.K. but what about if a metal bar is bent due to the stress? You can 
detect bent metal bars and infer the stress but the bar just might have
been bent by a force which is no longer present and you would interpret
the bent bar as being under stress which would not be correct.
Stress is also not a surface effect. It is internal to the material and
therefore is not available optically on the surface of an opaque material.
I'll just keep saying it. "You cannot see stress".

VR is not magic. It is not going to teach people to detect things they
cannot normally detect. Maybe it can be used to teach people to notice
subtle optical effects and infer their cause. Maybe it can be used to
teach people to hear notes and transcribe music by listening to it.

VR can be hooked to other sensors and present the sensors information in 
a novel way. Fire fighters "seeing" the temperature on a door by having
the door's temperature detected by a thermometer (Or some infrared sensor)
and having the VR system paste up a message like "This door is 123.4 
degrees" and the fire fighter can say "Yipes I'd better not touch this door"

So let's all start getting a little less stress O.K.

Now I'm going to run this through a spelling checker and I'll correct my
mistakes and put little (sic)s by everyone else's mistakes and no one
should get too testy about that right? Everyone spell checks their articles
before submitting them don't they?

        -Alan "I do solemnly swear not to break any physical laws" Kilian



 -Alan Kilian kilian@cray.com                  612.683.5499
  Cray Research, Inc.           | If god had meant us to use the metric system
  655 F Lone Oak Drive          | he would have given us ten finger and ten
  Eagan  MN,     55121          | toes. The author of _Lighter Elements_