webber@constance.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) (05/06/88)
In article <9167@reed.UUCP>, mojo@reed.UUCP (a slow 12-bar in A) writes: > > At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I'll pose a question: why > cyberspace? What could a consensual hallucination as a means of information > exchange offer that couldn't be more economically provided by less flashy > means (telnet, f'rinstance)? The problems is one of bandwidth. A ``normal'' text-oriented presentation of coming out line per line is essentially limited to the speed that you can read it at. A fullscreen text-presentation allows a more parallel presentation of the text permitting various status values and such to be constantly updated, the screen partioned into ``subwindows'' and ultimately gives you input that is limited by how fast you can skim. You still have problems with screen size in that skimming is easier in a newspaper than a magazine and similarly on a 1k by 1k bitmap terminal with a 19" monitor than on a vt100. However, text is not the input format that the brain/eye system is optimized to process (both from an evolutionary point of view and from an experiential point of view). The imagery most commonly processed by the brain/eye corresponds to stereo-2d imagery that can be consistantly interpreted as a continuous sequence of ``views''of a 3d scene. Thus if one could figure out a good set of spatial metaphors for normal computer interaction, something similar to cyberspace would be an optimal idiom. Currently very few people have access to equipment that is capable of maintaining any such metaphors at a sufficient level of realism to see what works and what doesn't. So right now the state of the art that I am aware of is: we don't really know what cyberspace should look like, but it is reasonable to expect a payoff from investigating the potential of cyberspace and so it is worthwhile trying to get sufficient compute power to explore the possibilities of this approach [if it doesn't pan out, I can always find something else to do with the hardware :-) ]. However, we have not reached the limit of non-cyberspace approaches either (the desktop metaphor being limited by the fact that most of us don't like 19" diagonal work desks nor using a rock (mouse) as a drafting pen (for that matter, even the typing page metaphor of the vt100 (or drawing page of tek4014) could be significantly improved by replacing the rs232 port with optical fiber and faster internal code processing to give more realistic screen modification rates)). ----- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)