I wrote a short story on (partly) the subject, entitled
"The Kingdom Of the Blind", if you want to read it.
Can I and others FTP it from somewhere?
> 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.
I think this needs qualification. There are lots of non-technical
reasons why people won't do just anything - market mechanisms, laws,
firmly held beliefs about privacy, governmental bureaucracy, etc. We
can't all just assume that we're going to have 1984 about everything.
There are a lot of social forces that prevent those sorts of things
from happening, to some degree at least. After all, there's tons of
info that people can use to control us even today, but in the USA at
least the only people who really use it in practice are the
telemarketers. And they are relatively harmless.
There's a hefty social dimension to the medium of VR, and I think we
should endeavor to understand it in terms of the media that has gone
before us. After all, written books were the "Great Doom" upon the
world at one point in our history.
> 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.
But if they were indeed that cheap, and consumers could get them
easily at Radio Shack, then why wouldn't you also be able to buy a
"bug scrambler" at the same price point? That's a free market in
action.
Even if you have such a bug, how are you going to give it to people?
You can give it to people you run into in person, but it would be
pretty much impossible to "bug" someone you've never met in person
before. And that's likely to be the bulk of contacts in a VR world,
if current Internet usage patterns are any indication.
Sorry about that cold, spinal feeling, I get it all the time.
Yeech. Thanks for that unpleasant, visceral thought.
> 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.
Can you name some? I personally can't think of any that the mass
market would want. If the mass market doesn't want it, then it won't
be cheap to produce, and then the mass market won't want it... that's
what I meant by the "stability" of consumer trends.
When the telephone first came out, only businesses and the very
wealthy could afford it. At that time, telephones were about 1000%
more useful than telegraphs. Whereas today, having body language
online is probably 2% - 5% more useful than having a video of a human
face. When trying to figure out what's going on in someone else's
head, human beings take the overwhelming bulk of their info from
speech patterns and facial expressions.
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...
To be honest, I don't think anything's going to be "weird" even a
decade from now. The brief history in my field - computer graphics -
shows that theory has preceeded mass-market commercial practice by
some 10-20 years. The non-technical aspects - "how much will it cost,
who's going to fund this, who will buy this, who wants this and why
should anyone care" - are a big part as to why it takes so long to
turn ideas into commercial reality. I think that a decade from now,
the commercial world will finally be getting the global illumination
algorithms of 1985 "right" in hardware, just as today they're finally
getting the Phong shading algorithms of 1975 "right" in hardware.
Also, VR has been one of the slowest sub-branches of computer graphics
to progress. Sutherland had a VR system back in 1969 (or 8?) And as
Henry Fuchs said at the last VRAIS conference, "we're better, but
we're not 25 years better."
These stumbling blocks aren't about technical issues at all. After
all, people worked most if not all of this stuff out 10-25 years ago.
It's about social issues, and what people can actually be bothered to
do with VR in real life at a given dollar cost.
Sorry if this doesn't seem like an Art discussion... I'm one of those
anthropology types who sees Art as hopelessly intertwined with the
other aspects of any given society. :-)
Cheers,
Brandon