esz001@cck.coventry.ac.uk (Will Overington) (06/24/91)
A recent item in the group has prompted me to voice out loud a
matter that has puzzled me for some time.
The group is called sci.virtual-worlds
^^^^^^
and yet various people, including me, keep talking of virtual reality.
^^^^^^^
I have wondered whether the two are congruent and have reached the
conclusion that they are not.
I have wondered whether virtual reality is a subset of virtual worlds
and have reached the conclusion that this might be the case.
What do others think?
In view of the fact that many of us were not in at the start of
sci.virtual-worlds could Bob perhaps tell us of his thinking then
and how, if at all, it has changed as time has passed.
I have seen various items about various new groups on usenet and the
matter of the charter documents describing what the group is about.
Could Bob perhaps send this out again now, for newer group members
such as myself to look at?
I am not in any way suggesting that contributions now should be rejected
if they fall outside of the start up charter, but it might perhaps put
new added zest into the group if this got discussed.
Will Overington
at Coventry Polytechnic in England.
[MODERATOR'S NOTE: A good question, and a persistent one.
[I chose virtual worlds to indicate the breadth of our work. Virtual
reality, at the time the newsgroup was begun, signified the work being
done by VPL Research, whose chief executive, Jaron Lanier, coined and
popularized "virtual reality." The phrase has generated a vast contro-
versy about the nature of reality which, while interesting in itself,
may not be immediately relevant to the many people working on the
technology per se. Further, virtual worlds is the term of art used by
Fred Brooks, the people at NASA, and other pioneers in the field. Also,
it has fine resonance with the concepts of phenomenology and gestalt
psychology, not to mention spirituality, which I find very attractive.
[However, over time, virtual reality has become the press's choice
(probably because it is controversy provoking) and the first term by
which most people learn about and speak of our work. I have a special
bias against press determination of popular discourse. The press has
an ability to determine our views of the world out of proportion to the
press's place in our society, IMHO, and it usually does so without any
unique claim (if any claim at all) to expertise.
[But we might as well tackle the question of lexicography simultaneous-
ly with -- and not at the expense of -- questions raised about the hard
technology by Dean Johnson of Cray and John Dormer at Purdue, in prior
postings. What do you think about the way WE define our work? -- Bob J.]