On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 4:31 PM, robert_horn...@netzero.net <robert_horn...@netzero.net> wrote: > ---------- Original Message ---------- > From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com> > > > No, it won't. People have been saying that for years and the fact > remains that a screen full of a text with a few relevant images is a > much better way to convey information than VR. > > ---- > > I look at comments like this as somebody who is very closed minded and not > willing to see more methods of instruction. A screen full of text certainly > is a useful way to convey certain kinds of factual information, and I > certainly see the analogy of a paper encyclopedia to be a useful way to > compile and organize general knowledge about this universe we live in, but it > isn't the only way and certainly isn't the "best" way to learn about all > knowledge. >
I think I agree with others, that there's no evident future growth to VR as the access modality for the web / internet information resources writ large. One could posit a UI development of some sort which changed people's minds on that - but it's not sitting at the edge of credible technology / waiting for a userbase explosion. Let me pose this a different way, however. Take UI entirely out of the picture - the Wikimedia Foundation is all about supporting projects that gather and create information for the public good, presenting that to the public, and creating software to encourage that. As no proof-of-concept now exists for a shift to VR taking off and replacing the web as the dominant modality, the proposal is premature. It's a Computer Science UI problem right now, a topic for research. The foundation isn't a research foundation, it's a practical engineering and content foundation. We should not, in my opinion, spend a lot of effort attempting to pioneer new areas of CS research. If we hypothesize that such a new modality develops out in the research community, then we could move to support / adopt it in good time. Additionally, we can think about how we do our current primary goal, of gathering and creating information for the public good, and think about whether we'd do that differently if our UI modality was something other than the web. Such thinking might usefully inform next-generation wiki tool development, in terms of how information is managed within the WMF projects. I don't see any obvious changes there, but I haven't thought about it that much. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l