cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Bob Jacobson) (06/25/91)
Steve Tice of Simgraphics, this year's SIGGRAPH VR coordinator,
dared me to crack a joke. Well, in my belief that entertainment should
also be educational, here's a true story that captures our field in a
nutshell:
* * *
The other day (all jokes start out, "The other day...") Tom
Furness and I were being interviewed by Joel Garreau of the WASHINGTON
POST. Joel is doing a new book on the future lifestyles of Americans,
and he thought that virtual worlds might be a part of it. We had a long
and somewhat sober discussion about the technology.
after I had gotten off the phone), Joel and Tom
But after I got off the phone, Tom and Joel sort of went wild.
They talked about all sorts of things, not least"teledildonics" --
i.e., virtual sex. Tom thought Joel was just making light conversation
...but wouldn't you know, in the next issue of the WASHINGTON POST
WEEKLY magazine, there was the honorable Dr. Furness predicting that
teledildonics was on the horizon.
"In fact," he was quoted by the WPW, "the HIT Lab has been
working on this problem for some time. We estimate the bandwidth
necessary for really good sex to be about 50 billion baud."
* * *
Suffice it to say, Tom was quite chagrined and the butt of
many jokes among our colleagues. But the story doesn't end here.
I was relating this little incident to a Japanese researcher
with a keen interest in our field.
He was exceptionally polite and, after I was done recounting
the story, he let go a small chuckle and said, "Very funny." Then
his face going serious, he asked, "Yes, but how many baud does it
really take?"
* * *
As the Firesign Future advises,
"The future...live it or live with it."
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Vosborne@software.org (Skip Osborne) (06/26/91)
5x10**10 baud = 1 Bawd? (capitalized, on the model of kilicalories) --