randoid@well.sf.ca.us (02/11/90)
<NOTE FROM MODERATOR: Several folks pointed out that I mangled a few lines from the material I posted for Randy Walser. I'm trying again. This time, it's one long file, around 650 lines long. I hope it works. I'm trying to learn on the job here. Thanks for your patience.> ELEMENTS OF A CYBERSPACE PLAYHOUSE Randal Walser Autodesk Research Lab Autodesk, Inc. 2320 Marinship Way Sausalito, CA 94965 January 31, 1990 Forthcoming in Proceedings of National Computer Graphics Association '90 Annaheim, March 19-22, 1990 ABSTRACT Until recently, computer interface designers have regarded human beings as "users" of computers, and computers have been regarded as tools for the human mind. That view is now being challenged by an emerging paradigm that redefines the relationship between humans and computers. One manifestation of the new paradigm is an exciting new medium, called cyberspace, that provides people with virtual bodies in virtual realities that emerge from simulations of three dimensional worlds. Building on a conception of cyberspace as a form of theater, I sketch out the elements of a cyberspace playhouse, a new kind of social gathering place where people go to participate in three dimensional simulations. As a specific example, I consider how a playhouse might be organized for sports and fitness. INTRODUCTION Cyberspace is a medium that gives people the feeling they have been transported, bodily, from the ordinary physical world to worlds purely of imagination. Although artists can use any medium to evoke imaginary worlds, cyberspace carries the worlds themselves. It has a lot in common with film and stage, but is unique in the amount of power it yields to its audience. Film yields little power, as it provides no way for its audience to alter film images. Stage grants more power than film, as stage actors can "play off" audience reactions, but still the course of the action is basically determined by a playwright's script. Cyberspace grants ultimate power, as it enables its audience not merely to observe a reality, but to enter it and experience it as if it were real. No one can know what will happen from one moment to the next in a cyberspace, not even the spacemaker. Every moment gives every participant an opportunity to create the next event. Whereas film is used to show a reality to an au Currently cyberspace is the subject of much discussion and excitement, and not only for academic reasons. Just as industries grew up around radio, telephony, film, television, and computers, an industry is likely to grow up around cyberspace. Understanding its nature and envisioning its applications can have significant practical consequences. The trouble is, the technology of cyberspace is immature, the art scarcely exists, and the economics are problematical. While it is easy to see that something important is taking shape, it is too early to tell quite what to make of it (for a discussion of some possibilities see [19]). The premise underlying this paper is that cyberspace is fundamentally a theatrical medium, in the broad sense that it, like traditional theater, enables people to invent, communicate, and comprehend realities by "acting them out." This point of view has been expressed beautifully by Brenda Laurel [8]. Acting, under this view, is not just a form of expression, but a fundamental way of knowing. To act is to become someone else, in another set of circumstances, and thereby to know and experience a different reality. By giving his body over to a character, an actor enters a character's reality, and he can be said to embody (that is, provide a body for) the character. The character lives through the actor but so, too, does the actor live through the character. An actor in cyberspace is no different, except that the body she gives to her character is not her physical body, but rather her virtual one. She embodies the character but she, personally, is embodied by cyberspace. A group of people is the first ingredient of theater, so some way must be provided for cyberspace patrons to gather in one place. Of course, in principle there is no need for patrons to assemble in the same physical space, as high speed data communication channels can be used to bring them together in imaginary places. The day may come when people can enter cyberspace from their own homes, or perhaps from any location at all (just as it is now possible to place a phone call from any vehicle within a cellular phone grid). Meanwhile, the infrastructure of cyberspace is bulky and expensive enough to warrant a physical gathering place. In this paper I sketch out some possible elements of such a place, a new kind of social center, called a cyberspace playhouse, where people go to play roles in simulations. While I expect that playhouses will be used for many purposes, including drama, design, education, business, fitness, and fun, here I describe a playhouse which emphasizes sports and physical conditioning. I have focused on sport because I think it epitomizes the application areas for which cyberspace will turn out to be best suited; namely, social activities that engage not just the mind but the whole body and the whole spirit. Cyberspace has barely begun to evolve as a medium, and of course no one can hope to understand it fully until it has fully matured. Yet we can try to imagine what it might become, and try to make it as grand as we can imagine. Sport is an ideal area in which to sharpen our vision. Sport is related to theater in that both are refined forms of play. Whereas theater evolved out of the human impulse to pretend, and thus to plan, sport evolved from the human impulse to assert one's self, and thus to survive. Actors perform in order to be someone else. Athletes act in NEW PARADIGM If one were to dissect the elements of cyberspace technology it might appear that cyberspace offers nothing really new. Indeed, many of the key elements, most notably computer graphics, have been around a long time. What is new about cyberspace is not so much the technologies that underly it, but the way the technologies are packaged and applied. Cyberspace is a medium that is emerging out of a new way of thinking about computers and their relationship to human experience. Under the old way of looking at things computers were regarded as tools for the mind, where the mind was regarded as a disembodied intellect. Under the new paradigm, computers are regarded as engines for new worlds of experience, and the body is regarded as inseparable from the mind. The new perspective on human/computer interaction is due in part to recent advances in computer graphics and simulation, and in part to reductions in the cost of key user interface technologies. The new perspective was precipitated, though, by the growing realization in the scientific community that the basis of rationality is not in the world, as had been supposed, but in the human body. The essence of this new view is expressed eloquently in five words, in the title of Mark Johnson's book, THE BODY IN THE MIND. In the introduction, Johnson lays out the fundamental tenets of the emerging paradigm, as follows: "We human beings have bodies. We are 'RATIONAL animals,' but we are also 'rational ANIMALS,' which means that our rationality is embodied. The centrality of human embodiment directly influences what and how things can be meaningful for us, the ways in which these meanings can be developed and articulated, the ways we are able to comprehend and reason about our experience, and the actions we take. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interaction with objects. It is never merely a matter of abstract conceptualizations and propositional judgments. [5]" In another time or in another society, Johnson's comments might seem obvious, even trivial. But in a society built on a philosophical and scientific tradition that elevates mind over body, his point of view is heresy of the highest order, for it challenges the presupposition that the world is inherently rational, the basis for the very notion of a mind apart from a body. Under the classical scientific view there is no need to give a place to the human body in any account of human reason because the classical view presupposes the existence of an objective reality with a rational structure. Reason is treated as a purely abstract system for converging step by step on the one correct description of the world. Under the new view, however, the world is not assumed to have a rational structure, and there is no sense in trying to find one. Instead, there are many possible worlds, as many as sentient beings can invent and experience. Nothing, under the new view, is meaningful until it has been experienced, either by the body, or by the "body in the mind" (that is, the body-related "schemata," in the mind, that organize and guide behavior). DEFINITION OF CYBERSPACE Until now I have spoken of cyberspace as a medium, but there is another sense of it. There is cyberspace the communications medium, and then there is cyberspace the phenomenon. Cyberspace the phenomenon is analogous to physical space. Just as physical space is filled with real stuff (so we normally suppose), cyberspace is filled with virtual stuff. Cyberspace, the medium, enables humans to gather in virtual spaces. It is a type of interactive simulation, called a CYBERNETIC SIMULATION, which gives every user a sense that he or she, personally, has a body in a virtual space. Just as a cybernetic simulation is a special kind of interactive simulation, a CYBERSPACE, the phenomenon, is a special kind of virtual space, one that is populated by people with virtual bodies. Roots Visionaries have discussed and promoted the essential aspects of cyberspace, under various names, since the sixties. The roots of the field are generally traced to Ivan Sutherland and his seminal work on "Sketchpad," the first widely known interactive computer graphics system [15]. Sutherland described a head-mounted three dimensional display as early as 1968 [16]. Another evolutionary line can be traced to the same period, to Douglas Engelbart and his efforts to augment human intellect [2]. Much later, Papert spoke of "microworlds," Krueger of "artifical reality," Brooks of "virtual worlds," Fisher and McGreevy of "virtual environments," Nelson of "virtuality," and Walker of "the world in a can" [12,7,1,3,11,18]. Indeed, the notion of projecting one's self into a virtual space is familiar to hackers throughout computerdom, from Unix masters who "move" deftly around the Unix file hierarchy, to adventure gamers who "fight" the forces of evil in imaginary worlds. The term "cyberspace" was f Today the emerging field is variously referred to as cyberspace, artificial reality, and "virtual reality," the term favored by Jaron Lanier, one of the most visible of the field's advocates [6]. Whereas Lanier would use "virtual reality" to refer both to a virtual space and experiences within the space, I distinguish a special kind of virtual space, a cyberspace, which promotes experiences involving the whole body. The distinction might seem obtuse, at first thought, but it is no different in principle from the distinction between film, say, and the apparent realities expressed through film (i.e., between "filmic space," on the one hand, and "virtualities" communicated via film on the other). Theatrical Conception As a form of theater, CYBERSPACE can be regarded as a computer-based medium that enables groups of people to play the roles of characters in cybernetic simulations of three dimensional worlds; crucially, cyberspace gives the role players the ability to sense a virtual reality from the point of view of the characters they play. I use the term WORLD in the ordinary sense to mean a three dimensional euclidean space in which objects obey certain fundamental and predictable laws of behavior and organization (as in "laws of nature"). A VIRTUAL REALITY is a consensual reality that emerges from an interactive simulation such as SIMNET [17] or Maze Wars+ [10] (as contrasted with a consensual reality that emerges from the ordinary physical world). By CONSENSUAL REALITY I mean the world, or a simulation of a world, as viewed and comprehended by a society. A CHARACTER is a being with a virtual body in a virtual reality. The role of a character is played by an INTELLECT, either a human (called a PATRON or sometimes just a PLAYER) or an artificial intelligence program (called an AI). A virtual object that embodies an intellect is referred to as a PUPPET, to emphasize that it is directed by a role player. Since an intellect plays the role of a character, a character can be said to be embodied by a puppet (which is to say, a puppet embodies both an intellect and a character). A puppet that embodies a human intellect is referred to as a DROID (as in "android") and a puppet that embodies an AI is called a BOT (as in "robot"). Sometimes the controlling intellects themselves are loosely referred to as droids or bots. To say that a virtual reality is consensual does not mean that its players must agree with each other about anything except how they perceive and act upon the underlying simulation. A virtual reality is "consensual" in that its player This definition of cyberspace is intentionally broad. Were it not for the stipulation that cyberspace be computer-based, the definition would admit many common forms of theater, sports, and games. As it stands, the definition includes many computer-based simulation games and training devices. It does not, however, include most computer-aided design (CAD) systems for three dimensional modelling. While three dimensional computer graphics is fundamental to cyberspace technology, most 3D CAD systems do not give their users an embodiment in virtual space - nor even, in most cases, a first-person view of a space. Their users are provided with instruments like mice and graphics tablets that enable them to reach through the looking glass, but not to jump feet first into virtual spaces. There are some who consider head-mounted visual displays to be requisite equipment for the true experience of cyberspace, but head-mounts are just one means to an end (though an especially effective means). What matters is the extent to which players are able to suspend their disbelief in the illusion that they inhabit bodies apart from their physical bodies. The sole purpose of cyberspace technology is to trick the human senses and sensibilities, to help people buy into and sustain an illusion. Head-mounted visual displays are important because they flood the human sense of sight with illusory images, making it much easier for most people to suspend their disbelief. Nonetheless, head-mounted displays are merely one means among many, including out-the-window visual displays, three dimensional audio displays, motion platforms, force-feedback devices, credible simulation worlds, dramatic tension, high stakes, engaging stories, and social reinforcement. The upshot is that there is no surefir ART OF SPACEMAKING The goal of a spacemaker is basically the same as the goal of a playwright, a filmmaker, or any other creative artist. In THE SEVEN STAGES OF THEATRE, Richard Southern describes art as "... an address (in some form) by an individual to a number of people" [14]. He is careful to point out that the art is not in the address, but in the way of addressing. As he says, art is the process of saying something and meaning something else. What creative artists do depends critically on the relation of their medium to their audience. A playwright creates a set of instructions for enactment by skilled actors who perform before an audience. A filmmaker does basically the same thing (often with the help of a screenwriter, a kind of playwright), except that what is presented is not a performance but rather a recording of one. In either case, the audience observes a reality but never participates directly in it. Whereas the playwright and the filmmaker both try to communicate the idea of an experience, the spacemaker tries to communicate the experience itself. A spacemaker sets up a world for an audience to act directly within, and not just so the audience can imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so they can experience it directly. The filmmaker addresses the mind. The spacemaker addresses the body, and thereby the mind. It is vital for the spacemaker to remember that a virtual reality is not just a computer-based simulation: it is a computer-based simulation played out by a group of people on a particular occasion. As I defined it earlier, a virtual reality is a special kind of consensual reality, one that is constructed from moment to moment by the spontaneous actions, and interactions, of the role players in a simulation. A virtual reality comes into existence when a group of people experience a simulation as if it were real - and that occasion, that one set of experiences, can happen only once. Thus the spacemaker can never hope to communicate a particular reality, but only to set up opportunities for certain kinds of realities to emerge. The filmmaker says "Look, I'll show you." The spacemaker says "Here, I'll help you discover." In part, the job of the spacemaker is to design and construct worlds for players to experience, but that is merely the technical side of it. The more important part lies, as Southern says, in saying something and meaning something else. The art, in other words, is not in what the spacemaker constructs, but in communicating an insight into what the spacemaker cannot construct (that is, some aspect of a deeper truth or higher reality). CYBERSPACE DECK In William Gibson's stories, cyberspace "cowboys" enter cyberspace by "jacking in" to an instrument called a "deck." The exact nature of a deck is never discussed, though it is clearly some sort of gateway through which people are transported to cyberspace. I use the term DECK in the same sense, to refer to a physical space containing an array of instruments which enable a player to act within, and feel a part of, a virtual space. Specifically, a cyberspace deck has seven components: 1. a CYBERSPACE ENGINE to generate a simulated world and mediate the player's interaction with it, 2. a CONTROL SPACE (a box of physical space) in which the player's movements are tracked, 3. SENSORS to monitor the player's actions and body functions, 4. EFFECTORS to produce certain physical effects and stimulate the player's senses, 5. PROPS to give the player solid analogs of virtual objects and vehicles, 6. a NETWORK INTERFACE to admit other players to the simulated world, and 7. an ENCLOSURE (or some sort of physical framework) to hold all the components. Many decks will have just one prop, like a stationary bicycle, a railing, or a chair, and some decks will have no props at all. CYBERSPACE PLAYHOUSE A CYBERSPACE PLAYHOUSE is a place where people go, for various reasons, to play roles in cybernetic simulations. Think of a playhouse as a hybrid theater, gymnasium, school, sports arena, and conference center. Its basic elements are modular cyberspace decks that are organized, and easily reorganized, according to the requirements of particular cyberspaces. Each playhouse has at least one STAGE, which is simply a physical area that encloses one or more cyberspace decks. Some playhouses will have many stages, with each one containing decks that have a similar form or function. Each deck is linked into a local area computer network (which may, in turn, be linked into a more global network). A cyberspace is said to be a MULTIPLAYER SPACE when it emerges from a simulation that is generated simultaneously by two or more decks. By the definition given above, a cyberspace must have at least one human player (since a cyberspace emerges from a cybernetic simulation, which embodies a person), bu If cyberspace decks can be made modular enough, and portable enough, it will be easy to equip a playhouse for practically any kind of cyberspace. In principle, a cyberspace playhouse could be used for everything from drama and sports to design, education, games, product promotion, planning, job training, and sensational parties. In practice, each playhouse will be limited by the types of decks it contains. If a cyberspace requires a certain type of deck, which a playhouse does not have, then the playhouse will not be able to "run" the cyberspace at that particular time. To put it the other way around, a playhouse can run a cyberspace if 1) the house has the cyberspace in its (software) library, 2) it has the types of decks the space requires, and 3) a deck is available for at least one participant. It is easy to imagine that some playhouses will specialize to the point that they rarely, if ever, run new spaces, and never replace their decks, while other playhouses will offer a steady stream Since each deck is capable of running a complete cybernetic simulation, a playhouse with 20 decks, say, can run 20 spaces simultaneously. Or, at the other extreme, if every player chooses to join the same space, the playhouse will run just that one space, and all 20 players will be in it. SPORTS AND FITNESS PLAYHOUSE In this section, I briefly consider the design of a SPORTING HOUSE, a kind of cyberspace playhouse dedicated to sports and fitness. An analysis of all the issues is well beyond the scope of this paper, but even a cursory look at a few issues raises some intriguing questions and possibilities. The critical thing to realize about the design of cyberspaces, for sports, is that sporting decks will generally have sophisticated props, like recumbent bicycles and inclined treadmills, and that sporting houses will make money by renting time on those decks. The purpose of a cyberspace for sports is not just to help people have fun and stay fit. It is also to help keep sporting houses in business, by keeping their decks full of players. If sporting houses are to be economically viable, then the spaces they run must 1) give patrons good reasons to rent time on decks, and 2) be organized so as to keep every deck constantly in use, but without making patrons wait inordinately long for decks to become available. A sporting house could be used for many purposes, including physical training, survival games (like capture-the-flag), races, tours, rallies, various forms of dance*, tournaments, adventure games, orienteering, and variations on traditional sports like baseball and racquetball. It might be located in any number of places, like a school or university, a training camp, a shopping mall, a corporate office building, a hotel, or an amusement park. The kind of sporting house I have in mind emphasizes fitness and is modelled on circuit training, a conditioning regimen consisting of an alternating sequence of aerobic (steady) and anaerobic (explosive) exercises. A typical sporting house of this kind might be located in a converted fitness center and have, say, eleven stages: four for dancing, two for lifting, and one each for cycling, rowing, climbing, skiing, and running/walking. If each stage has four decks, the playhouse would hold 44 decks in all. That means it could accomodate a total of 4 ---------------- * I use the term "dance" in a very general sense to refer to any kind of whole body movement or routine that does not depend on a stationary prop. Except for computer and electronic apparatus, a dance stage is simply a carpeted room that is big enough to allow a player to take three or four steps. Thus, a dance stage can be used for a wide range of purposes, including stretching, aerobic dancing, martial arts, racquet sports, batting sports, calisthenics, and "body music" (a new form of musical expression, made possible by cyberspace, in which a dancer maintains the quality of a musical jam session by performing certain dance routines and exercises). ---------------- In order to control traffic and guarantee the availability of decks, the visits of patrons must be carefully scheduled and planned. Since a circuit requires a number of fitness machines, generally one for each exercise, it is important that sporting houses be designed to periodically pull players along from one deck (exercise station) to another. Fortunately, since cyberspace playhouses will be extensively wired and computerized, patrons can be tracked and guided individually. This is useful not just for traffic control, but also as the basis for personalized games and workout programs. On the other hand, the goal of the spacemaker (under the theatrical approach) is not just to foster personalization, but also socialization. The goal is not to equip people to disappear into their own private realities (desirable as that may be, for some purposes), but to help individual patrons participate in public realities with other living beings. A sporting house, then, is construed to be an enterprise that rents out time in public cyberspaces. These are living environments that patrons may visit just as if they were public parks or recreation centers. A cyberspace has a life of its own, in other words, independently of individual humans. This does not imply that a cyberspace can exist independently of humans. By the definition above, a cybernetic simulation must involve at least one human. The point is that a space, in a sporting house, hangs together like a real place, and while it cannot exist independently of human participation, neither does it end when the last patron leaves - it simply pauses until another patron enters. Thus, while a cyberspace is an evolving environment, it changes only when there is at least one patron jacked into it. This might be an ontological hedge, but it is also a practical necessity: in order for a cyberspace to continue unfolding without a human to experience it the playhouse would have to contin Since a training circuit is a sequence of activities at successive exercise stations, it seems natural to set up a correspondence between the activities and the segments of a path or course in a cyberspace. So, for example, a simple circuit that calls for running, rowing, and cycling might correspond to a course with three legs: a running trail, a lake, and a highway. The player would then use a treadmill to run along the trail, a rowing machine to cross the lake, and a stationary bicycle to pedal down the highway. In general a workout in cyberspace could be regarded as similar, conceptually, to the traversal of an obstacle course in the physical world. This conception is appealing in its simplicity, but unfortunately it is too simple to be viable in an actual sporting house. The problem is that decks are shared resources, and if demand is high then a particular deck may not be available when a particular player needs it. It is not reasonable to expect a player to wait on a bicycle, for Of course, a commercial playhouse that is open to the public can no more guarantee the availability of a deck than a movie theater can guarantee a seat, at a particular time, to everyone who wants to see a popular movie. The best one can hope for is a strategy that minimizes inconvience without unduely compromising the service the playhouse is designed to provide. One such strategy, for a sporting house that emphasizes circuit training, is to allow variability in the sequence of training activities. That is, a player would specify the activities she wishes to perform, but not a necessary order. Instead, she would rely on the playhouse to route her to available decks, whatever they may be, as long as they are members of the set of decks she has selected. In fact, varying the sequence of activities is considered good practice by trainers and coaches, because athletes are quite good (subconsciously) at learning the path of least resistance through a regular exercise program [13]. So var Unfortunately, if a player can move in any order from one deck to another, then it is no longer possible to maintain a neat correspondence between physical activities and features in a virtual terrain. If a spacemaker knows, for example, that running will always be followed by rowing, then he can arrange for a running trail to lead to a boat dock on a lake. But what if no rowing machine is available to a player when she reaches the virtual dock? What if a bicycle is all that is available? Is she supposed to pedal the bike across the lake? Anything is possible in cyberspace, even bicycles that skim over water or fly through the air, but well constructed cyberspaces, like well crafted plays and movies, will not rely on magic to repair conceptual flaws. The flying bicycles in the movie E.T., for example, are not merely contrivances that enable plot transitions, but an integral part of the story. It might be better, in the circuit training example, to provide a virtual boat that is pedaled instead of rowed across the lake, especially if the available prop is a recumbent bicycle. In that case it should be as easy for the player to believe she is sitting in a boat as on a bicycle. On the other hand, if the prop is a standard racing bicycle, then there will probably be a mismatch between the way the player moves in physical space and the way her puppet moves in cyberspace (since, presumably, she is sitting in a basically upright position in physical space while her character is reclining in cyberspace). A mismatch of this sort might be described as KINESTHETIC DISSONANCE and should be avoided, in general, because it informs the body that something is "out of whack," and can break the illusion that the virtual world is real. To summarize to this point: it seems that trying to lay out a space in a way that corresponds to a variable sequence of activities raises difficult problems when shared resources are involved. One conceivable alternative is to vary the space itself in correspondence with the activities. A player might make an appointment with the playhouse, specifying which activities he wants to include in his workout program (or let the playhouse recommend a program based on his general goals). The playhouse could then compare the player's specification with the specifications of other players who are scheduled for the same period, and weave all the activities into sequences that preclude blockages. Then, the playhouse could employ some automatic means to piece together a different space for each player, as dictated by the order of activities in each player's workout program. This could be a very complex endeavor if the spaces were constructed entirely from scratch, but it would be feasible if th Another approach would be simply to provide an entirely different space for every activity (as opposed to a different space for every workout program). Thus, there would be a space for bicycles, a space for rowboats, a space for skiis, and so on. There would not be as much variety in each space, but there would no problem matching players' physical activities and props with virtual counterparts. The transition from one deck to another would correspond to a "hyperjump" from one space to another. Still another approach would be to set up a correspondence between exercises in the physical world and sporting events, like races and lifting contests, in a single virtual space. Unlike activities on an obstacle course, there would be no need for any of the sporting events to take place in contiguous locations. When a player moves from one deck to another his character would make a hyperjump to the starting location of the next event. Although events would not need to occur contiguously, there is no reason why they should not, and in fact they might even overlap in virtual space; thus, a bicycle race might occur on the same road as a foot race, and avoiding collisions with other players (or intentionally causing collisions) might be part of the challenge. To insure the periodic rotation of players from deck to deck, a time limit might be imposed on each event. If each event lasted, say, ten minutes, then a player could rotate through six different major activities in an hour. Even if CONCLUSION Over a quarter century ago, Marshall McLuhan said that electric technology is bringing us rapidly to "... the final phase of the extensions of man - [to] the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society ..." [ 9]. It was difficult, then, to imagine quite what McLuhan was talking about, but today the "final phase" could well be at hand, in the form of an emerging medium called cyberspace. Does cyberspace represent the final extension McLuhan had in mind? It is still too early to tell, but the important question is not what cyberspace is, today, but rather what it can become. McLuhan's great insight was that to understand a medium one must understand its message (as opposed to its content), and the message of any medium is the "change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." We have the opportunity, today, to make whatever we want of cyberspace. To do so we must decide what message we want it to convey; which is to say, we must imagine how we want it to change human affairs. Today, a cyberspace playhouse is only a thought experiment, but it could soon be the infrastructure that makes us whole again, by bringing us back to our bodies. 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