wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (08/21/90)
In article <BRUCEC.90Aug18120412@phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com> brucec%phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen) writes:
In the large-scale kinds of cyberspace people keep talking about, I think
the only solution is intelligent "guide" programs, which can build up a
navigation space with a suitable topology to match what a user needs at
any given time.
That's an interesting idea - a specialization of the general "assistant"
type programs. I hadn't thought too much about that. I have been
concentrating on the kinds of artifacts we might put into cyberspaces to aid
navigation.
We tend to think of an overview
like a map, which shows all the important spatial relationships down to
some minimum scale. This doesn't work well for high dimensional continuous
spaces or highly connected non-continuous spaces. Overviews in high
dimensions tend to be more like document outlines than maps.
I agree an overview is not a panacea, but I do think one wants to have some
kind of map-like view which allows one to put local detail into global
context. This is why I'm interested in generalized fisheye views, which
have this as their explicit purpose.
The user still needs to have some sort of mental model of where she's going
to go when she teleports, or steps through a trapdoor to the next level
down. People can accept nonlinear movement, but they still need a map of
some sort that they can internalize at some level of detail.
Yes and no. Teleportation is used for those time when the user says "I
don't care where I am or where my goal is, but I know my goal is X - take me
there. No real map is needed for this; just a unique method of identifying
targets. On the other hand, you're right that people cannot navigate to any
significant degree unless they have *some* internal map of where they're
going.
The key point of all this discussion, which I doubt very much we disagree
on, is that it's very important to consider the cognitive and sensory
capability of the person inhabiting the virtual world when designing it.
Developing a taxonomy of design or implementation spaces for these worlds
is a useful project, but we can't let that be the end of our thinking about
the use and variety of space in Virtual reality. The real-world 8-)
virtual reality designer is going to have to deal with (at least) two kinds
of space, the world design space and the user navigation space, and the
mapping(s) between them.
Very true. Here we completely agree. As I've mentioned before, the idea
behind semantic spaces is to develop a fully-general, extremely powerful
theory with which people can unify information about cognitive and
technological limits to design the cyberspaces they want.
[...] the landscape you're trying to navigate through is probably changing
on several different time scales; some of those changes are local to your
current locality and on a time scale at least as fast as or faster than
your own movements. The map keeps changing, inpart due to your own
actions, but only in part.
This turns out to be incredibly disorienting to people. Our experience
(admittedly *very* small) is that people can deal with themselves moving, or
the landscape moving, but don't do well with both, unless the landscape
movement is well-constrained. You can see this in two simple systems. In a
system which allows users to get their viewpoint up to relativistic speeds,
people tend to lose track of what they're doing when the terrain they're
passing over starts changing. Also, try one of those games where you have
to land a plane on a moving target (like an aircraft carrier) - very
frustrating.
I agree. We can learn an awful lot from the way such annotations are
handled in thematic maps which try to merge several different kinds of
information. I woudl like to see more people in the hypertext/vr area
studying the way physical and thematic maps are designed; there's a lot of
useful prior art there.
I'm not sure what you mean by "thematic maps." Can you give some examples
and a reference or two?
--
--Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485
Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com
"Politics is Comedy plus Pretense."brucec%phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;) (08/24/90)
In article <WEX.90Aug21124634@dali.pws.bull.com> wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: > I'm not sure what you mean by "thematic maps." Can you give some examples > and a reference or two? I mean a map which is intended to show the geographic distribution of some non-geographic entity. For instance, maps of the food products produced by various regions, or usage of energy. I honestly don't know where I got the term, and I can't find a definition anywhere. I suppose that it's a relict of 5th grade geography class (which was much longer ago than I like to remember). The closest term I can find is "special-subject map". Is that familiar? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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