On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 7:53 AM, Pat Rapp <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don’t think it’s an either/or situation. VR and AR are both valid and
> valuable, but suit different needs. Yes, both are here, just not well
> distributed yet. The advantage AR has is that it fits nicely onto our
> phones. I personally can’t imagine a virtual world on a phone due to the
> high demand of data download. An AR overlay is significantly more portable
> than a rich 3d world with it’s intense graphics. That’s not to say it won’t
> happen. We all remember large graphics bringing 2d websites to a grinding
> halt in the early days. Our technology had to catch up.
>
Vinge gave a talk some time back where he talked about the potentials of AR,
with a vision of AR that was very graphic intensive, including very detailed
avatars and overlays, etc. -- it was a great talk, but I kept thinking about
the bandwidth requirements and the central control aspect, because it all
implied sending the graphics down from a server and the server and the
viewer knowing the exact spatial location of the objects being spoofed --
i.e., we needed bandwidth we don't have yet and a localization technology
that's much much more precise than the one we have. To him that meant AR had
to wait. At least two ways to look at that: He had a high bar for "AR" (e.g.
it wasn't AR to him if you couldn't replace someone's head with a lion's
head in real time and have that lion's head's location be specified by the
server and not inferred by the viewer); or he was stuck on the idea that we
have to be able to share the vision. I think it was more the former, since
the example he used (replacing his head with a clown head, I think) was
essentially about getting punk'd.
(I somehow managed to never this this talk bookmarked on my delicious
bookmarks, so I'm having a hard time linking but I will if I track it down
before the thread goes dead.)
Anyway, my thought about that was that an AR overlay didn't need to rely on
heavy downloads from a central server and wouldn't necessarily need to rely
on precision localisation analogous to GPS -- rather, you could use
something analogous to vector art (something along the lines of: don't send
the bitmaps, send an algorithm to generate them) and local processing power
to position the clown's head on Vernor's body. That really opens up the
possibilities for recombinant street culture. In notes for a novel that's
currently back-burnered, I conceptualized a sort of semi-hostile street/club
culture where people would "digg" other people's public avatars as a sort of
quasi-consensual hacking/victim pairing: Rig the public approval system to
stack votes for a ridiculous avatar (like a clown's head) in such a way that
Johnny Handsome looks like Bozone the Clown whenever he's in his (soon
formerly) favorite night club. (It's quasi-consensual because by joining in
the practice of letting people rate your avatar you choose to take the risk
-- though perhaps not with a great deal of consideration -- that people can
assault you in this way.)
>
>
> I’m just sayin’ facebook’s user base is humongous due to that fact that it
> takes very little effort to learn how to use it. That doesn’t mean virtual
> worlds will die and drop off the face of the technology landscape. They are
> widely used for other purposes, and provide a rich “you are there” interface
> that cannot and will not be displaced by AR or social networking. That’s all
> I’m sayin’. : )
>
Right. There's tremendous potential value in all kinds of imaginable ways in
a world that can be extended as far as our address-space allows. The TARDIS
is the best example I can think of, of how to really drive that home to
people: There's a police box in the middle of a field, and you walk into it
and suddenly you're in a large room. Well, a large (very large, in some
versions) building, actually. You step out, and you're in the field and
there's this little police box (which suddenly seems even smaller).
So, no, VR doesn't go away: It's too bloody valuable, in ways we don't even
understand yet. ("Madam, can you tell me the value of a newborn child?")
I don't know what John Jainshigg has been talking about (have to check that
out), but what I've been thinking about mostly is ways to connect virtual
space to real space, either as an overlay, a shadow, or an n-dimensional
extension (like a TARDIS in the room). (New metaphor: The TARDIS in the
room, meaning we're ignoring an obvious way to completely step outside the
problem. Not sure what I'd use it for, though...)
So, anyway, the WAB building in RL goes to three stories, but the WAB
building in A/VR goes to 10 stories (and that's just up). Which leads of
course to a whole host of interesting questions, e.g.: If you're in AR
on-site, and you go to the 9th floor, what happens to your body? I imagine a
huddle of glassy-eyed people bumping blindly against the empty wall in RL
where the A/VR stairway continues... (Where's Ben? He could write that scene
so well.)
--
--
eric scoles | [email protected]
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
