Re: VR, medium-rare

Brandon Van every (vanevery@rbdc.rbdc.com)
Sat, 26 Aug 95 07:05 EDT

by saying the most powerful and compelling I was talking on a couple of
different fronts- as a cultural force VR is in the same realm as TV and
film- technologically sophiisticated and deliverable at a personal level on
a global scale. While I agree with your point about the power of
'traditional' mediums (in fact you picked some of my favorites :)!) those
pieces are singular, they xist in one space at one time. while
reproductions are possible they are not the 'genuine article' and noticably
so. that doesn't exist in the virtual world. That is part of the wonder of
the digital dimension- infinite replication without degradation. I would
even argue that this is the primary difference in virtual art and what
truly puts it into it's own dimension (like 2D, 3D or 4D art)

Certainly these are dimensions of power that I hadn't considered. VR
is indeed a potentially awesome social force. For one who doesn't
care much for the current fare of TV advertizing, that makes it a
potentially dangerous force. Hopefully it can be countermanded by
putting VR into the hands of the people, rather than the networks.

>I've read "Neuromancer" and "The Difference Engine." I'm a terribly
>illiterate person. :-) The latter books really wasn't about VR at
>all, but about what would happen if steam-powered computers had been
>invented a few hundred years ago. It's not at all improbable.
>Mechanical computers existed back then but were very slow. If you
>hooked them up to a steam engine, they would compute faster. This was
>actually tried in the 1990's on Charles Babbage's "Difference Engine"
>by some students at either Oxford or Cambridge, and it actually
>worked! We really could have had mechanical rather than electrical
>computers back then....

fascinating- where would further info on that be available?

Not sure really - my copy of "The Difference Engine" seems to have
gone AWOL. Try doing a web crawler search at <http://webcrawler.com>
on Charles Babbage and see what you come up with. Otherwise, go to
the sci-fi section of most books stores and see if it says something
on the inside cover.

>As for "Neuromancer" - big whoop.

thou shalt burn in analog hell for all eternity!
blasphemer of the holy st gibson! ;-)

Actually, I don't think St. Gibson think's he's a saint at all. On
one of those rare instances when I was doing a full-channel flip and
landed on 42, the Sci Fi Channel, I ran across an interview of him in
progress. He seemed a very modest fellow, particularly on the use of
the word "Cyberspace." Just a phrase he coined for something that's
already there: all that digital information that's floating around and
affecting our lives. VISA is Cyberspace, for instance. I wasn't even
convinced from his interview that he's particularly keen on VR hype in
general. He seemed to be more interested in telling stories, really.
:-)

In other words, I think VR hype has seized Steve Gibson for its
purposes, rather than vice versa.

(read *beaucoup sarcasm*- I'm good at it verbally but with a keyboard....?)

Don' wOrry I gOt it. :-)

Cheers,
Brandon