Re: Terra (the world in your hands)
Mark D. Pesce (mpesce@netcom.com)
Fri, 9 Jun 95 09:57:57 -0700
At 03:16 PM 6/8/95 EDT, Mike Roberts wrote:
>
>I have to tell people about something I saw the day before yesterday at the
>interactive media festival in LA. It's related to the meaning and semantics of
>cyberspace, in a way. And the future of the planet. And lots of other stuff.
>
>I saw, running on a reality engine, our world. Not some jerky, nasty, low res
>version of the world. I saw an 10x8 projected hi-res interactive model, which
>was controlled using a hand spinnable globe (rotation in an arbitay direction)
>and a spacemouse (viepoint).
>
>I rotated the world. I flew over it. And I learned. I learned BIGTIME (but
more
>on that later). The model goes down, and down, and down. The people at the
>Terra Vision project have combined lots of different models. The have one
of the
>big German towns (Bremen I **believe**) mapped down to building-level
features.
>Other areas of the world don't currently have this level of detail, but
they are
>working on it ...
>
>Suddenly, it's there. The world, in your hands. You realise so completely,
>absolutely, that this is one planet, that the boundaries are arbitary,
goverment
>imposed, totally false. You also realise that this isn't much data. It might
>**seem** like a lot to today's machines (the web site (URL below) mentions
than
>32bits worth of virtual memory isn't really enough ...), but the very fact
that
>it's even manipulable using today's primitive computing devices (not than a
>reality engine is that puny :) ) is, quite frankly, amazing. This is a
fucking
>***tiny*** planet. Not small. Tiny.
>
>Terrra Vision, for me, crystalised a lot of questions bumping around in my
head.
>Just what kind of simulation is this universe we enhabit ? Pretty impressive,
>whatever, and the coding system (DNA) compactness for the complexity it
>generates is, well, nothing short of incredible. Plus a bunch of other things.
>And it makes me want to apply one cardinal rule that strikes me everytime I
>write something recursive and beautiful. If you want the system to remain
>stable, you shouldn't fuck with it too much. You certainly shouldn't **tweak**
>it while you are inside it. Ever been **inside** a VR environment, interacting
>like crazy, when it crashes ?? It's bad. Disorientating. Very Nasty. Words
don't
>even come close to describing the claustraphobia. You rip off the goggles and
>grab a breath of air. Not possible inside the simulation we enhabit daily.
>
>We have to take care of this little planet of ours. I, for one, don't want
>**anyone**, present, or future, to see a planetery crash. It would not be, as
>they say, a good time. I think what we need is to take a few reality
engines on
>the road, across America, in a bus, and to every place on the face of the
>planet. Or, if we have to wait, we only have to wait, I estimate, 6 years,
>before RealityEngine(now)==PC(then). But time's a wasting. We need a five
year
>plan. Get the globes to places of conflict, to places of learning, places
where
>computer eguipment has never gone. Stick solar panels out in daytime and at
>night, use the power that was gathered to **educate**. This is a far, far,
>better too than LSD was in the 1960's ..
>
>The URL:- http://www.artcom.de/projects/terra/
Mike has got this exactly right. T_Vision is the most impressive piece of
computer design I've ever seen. I spent a lot of time at IMF talking to the
folks at ART+COM (Axel, Joachim, etc.) about it, and about how to creat VRML
interfaces to it...
We might have something by SIGGRAPH...
Mark