Re: storing visiblity info. in VRML (fwd)

Jon Holdsworth (jon@melb.alexia.net.au)
Wed, 6 Sep 1995 21:14:37 +1000 (EST)

>
>
> > Does this mean that we're headed for a VR universe of people who
> > really don't get along with their neighbors in real life, and seek VR
> > as their primary means of escape?
>
> This happens _now_ through MUDS and IRC.
>
> The Socially-Disfunctional appear to be always with us.
>
> This will get worse as "Capture" technology advances - you will be able
> to Capture the bodily form,
>
> Hmm. Not really necessary. All you have to do is capture someone's
> face and stick it on top of any body you care to.
>

Not enough, I'm afraid.

The essence of a person, particularly someone you find attractive, goes
much deeper than that. But (unfortunately), its all just a matter of
pattern recognition and extraction to a computer program.

> body language, speech patterns, clothing
> styles, etc, of anybody, probably without them knowing,
>
> Hmm. I'm not convinced that people will _ever_ be able to capture
> _all_ of these things "without the other party knowing." I predict

I wrote a short story on (partly) the subject, entitled
"The Kingdom Of the Blind", if you want to read it.

> that people's VR usage patterns will preclude certain kinds of
> information being available in the first place.

Nope. You'll be able to do ANYTHING.

> Speech patterns w/o others knowing - yes, if you can get them to talk
> to you over the Internet for long enough.

Bugs are already the size of mosquitoes, and they wont cost $100k
either.

Sorry about that cold, spinal feeling, I get it all the time.

> Body language w/o others knowing - I'm not so sure about this one. I
> think it will be awhile before the home consumer has easy access to
> high-fidelity body sampling technology, as in enough to reproduce a
> person's actual body language. (And now that I've gotten the
> techno-quibble out of the way... :-) Why would people transmit their
> body language over the Net? Is it really that likely that people will

Why not? There could be any number of applications.

But, on a tech-level, I was thinking more about feeding the output from
holographic cameras (or even just several cameras, its just that a
single holographic panel could do the work and not be very big) into
a smartbox, probably a neural net device with a controlling cpu.

> strap themselves into full body suits with 100's of sensors and wander
> around their living rooms to do Internet VR? I think it's far more

See above.

> Clothing styles w/o others knowing - that's some really advanced
> machine vision you're talking about. Technically, "it'll be awhile."

I dont really care that much about the next 3 years. Apart from the
interesting artistic and mind-altering things that WILL happen and
surprise us all, I KNOW whats in the next 3 years.

But after (c) 1998, things are going to get weird...

> This goes well beyond Couch Potato "life"styles.
>
> If one is interested in doing VR Art in the present day, then it's
> probably worth noting what's going to happen 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50
> years from now, and what might never happen. If only to understand
> the implications of the medium itself.

Thank you :-)

>
> Cheers,
> Brandon
>

Seeya

Jon