good@baviki.enet.dec.com (03/01/90)
There have been a couple of excellent, long articles posted to this group which give a good introduction to the area of virtual worlds research. I'd like to point people to a couple more references. A key theoretical book is "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception" by James Gibson. This contains some of the major psychological grounding for much of today's current work, especially for the virtual environments work at NASA-Ames. This 1979 book concluded James Gibson's 50-year career in visual perception. The book challenges much of the traditional approach to visual perception, and is quite readable for people without much background in this area. If you are seriously interested in working in the virtual worlds area, I highly recommend reading this book. It's available in paper from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates in Hillsdale, New Jersey. There's also another general overview of the area that I'd recommend. This one gives more graphical explanations of how things like the DataGlove and Polhemus sensor work than the newsgroup articles. It's Steve Ditlea's article on "Another World: Inside Artificial Reality" from the November 1989 issue of PC/Computing, pp. 90-102. Michael Good Good@Baviki.Enet.Dec.Com