brucec%phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS. (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;) (09/14/90)
In article <7468@milton.u.washington.edu> randy@xanadu.com (Randy Farmer -- A su rvivor of the Lost Patrol) writes: > > Yes, you missed one that IMHO is the best of all: True Names by Vernor > Vinge (in his anthology: True Names and Other Dangers). > I was begining to wonder if anyone else reading this newsgroup knew about Vinge. I mentioned him in a posting here a few weeks ago, and no one commented, which usually means one of: 1) *everyone* knows that, greenie! 2) nobody knows and nobody cares ... go 'way 3) my internet connection was accidentally plugged into the 8th dimension, so no one heard me :-) > For a picture of an IMPLEMENTABLE cyberspace (you still have to wave your > hands about the EEG interface though ;D) read this. Vinge DOES know > something about computers and networks (where Gibson has often pointed > out (bragged?) that he does not. His 'real' world is also much closer to > ours, and much less distopian. Oh yeah! It's a good story too. > Agreed. Vinge knows what he's talking about, and it is a good story. Also, the technology he describes has implications both to other technologies and to the structure of society beyond what he describes in the book. This is usually a sign that the author has tried to build a well-researched and self-consistent background for the story. I don't think that Gibson did either one of those things; his books are fun to read for the adventure and the atmosphere, but they don't make me think, "That makes sense. But that must mean that ..." > Lucasfilm's Habitat Projects were partially inspired by some of the ideas > in True Names (most notably, reduced bandwidth and what we call 'surreal-time' ) > There was nothing in Neromancer we could use. Nada. Vinge said: "Habitat *IS* > The Other Plane with two execptions: #1) The EEG interface and #2) Distributed > Hosts. But #1 is fantasy!". Morningstar and I are working on #2. > > Please note, though I didn't like the Gibson books and don't feel they > really help in understanding what a REAL WORKING cyberspace will be like, they > ARE required reading for any cyberhacker (*IF* the stimulate the creative/ > critical brain cells!) > My problem with this concentration on Gibson is that he didn't have a very good idea of what cyberspace WAS, but he stuck a label on it, and now everyone wants to use the label for something or other, and then argue that everyone else is misusing it. Vinge didn't label, he described. Maybe what he described isn't the only thing we can do with VR (probably isn't), but it's something concrete enough that we can try to specify and design an implementation of it. > > F. Randall Farmer > Mother of Habitat > randy@xanadu.com Please tell me more about Habitat. Are there papers you can cite? -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: USE THIS ADDRESS TO REPLY, REPLY-TO IN HEADER MAY BE BROKEN! Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab email: brucec@tekcrl.labs.tek.com Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc. phone: (503)627-5241 M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR 97077
cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) (09/14/90)
A non-"cyberspacish" author worth considering is George Leonard. His EDUCATION AND ECSTACY (sorry, I've forgotten the year but know it was in the early 70's) did a fair job on the concept of the "virtual classroom," in the larger context of reshaping the learning experience. I suspect he drew upon Ray Bradbury's famous story, "The Veldt," in which a couple of steamed children lure their parents into a lion-inhabited virtual playroom...and the play stops here.
davidr@ux5.lbl.gov (David Robertson) (09/25/90)
F. Randall Farmer brings up Vernor Vinge as an author besides William Gibson who has written a fictional account of virtual reality. Another author is Roger Zelazny, who wrote The Dream Master, first as a magazine serial in 1964 and then in book form in 1966. Speculation follows regarding some ideas in The Dream Master that might be relevant to virtual reality: (1) Picking up subtle muscular cues to guide what Zelazny calls the Shaping, giving the sense of effortless control which is probably behind some of the desire to have an EEG interface. (2) Creating a world while in a dream- or trance-like state. Vinge writes about much the same thing, except that his has the advantage of being built for more than 2. An aside: the most vivid (private) virtual realities I have experienced have been lucid dreams, which interestingly enough are written about in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge and the moderator of this newsgroup. While the last paragraph is somewhat fanciful as far as providing gist for implementing a virtual reality, it does bring up the issue that it may not be necessary to brute force all the details of a virtual reality if the imagination is brought into play. Much the same thing is said by Kent Paul Dolan: (message id <7988@milton.u.washington.edu>) >To generalize, don't overdesign the early systems to provide every possible >sensory input. Start by trusting the body/memory/imagination/wishful >thinking to provide the parts that are hard to simulate if you only do the >easy ones well. David Robertson dwrobertson@lbl.gov ******************************************************************* ``What we call reality consists of a few iron posts of observation between which we fill in by an elaborate papier-mache' construction of imagination and theory.'' John Wheeler, quoted in Howard Resnikoff, The Illusion of Reality. *******************************************************************