hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu (moderator of sci.virtual worlds) (02/09/90)
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. It is hard to imagine that any enterprise, or any medium, could have a more profound effect on human affairs. REFERENCES 1. Brooks F. P. (1988) Grasping reality through illusion - interactive graphics serving science. ACM SIGCHI. 2. Engelbart D. C., Watson R. W., and Norton J. C. (1973) The augmented knowledge workshop. Proc. National Computer Conference. pp. 9-21. 3. Fisher S. S., McGreevy M., Humphries J., and Robinett W. (1986) Virtual environment display system. ACM 1986 Workshop on Interactive 3D Graphics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu (Bill Wolfe) (02/11/90)
>From hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu (moderator of sci.virtual worlds): > 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. [...] 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). > > [various imperfect solutions to the problem of kinesthetic dissonance] It would seem that there is a straightforward, if not yet technically feasible, means of completely solving the problem of kinesthetic dissonance... simply construct a means by which cyberspace I/O can be interposed between the brain and its various I/O devices. If this were done, then all input received by the brain would be coming from the cyberspace system, and it would be possible to achieve perfect cyberspace. It is conceivable that the user could be given input which indicates the availability of a virtual body having radically different capabilities (e.g., full 360-degree vision in ALL directions, the ability to ooze through keyholes, etc.). The outputs from the user's brain would be interpreted in terms of actions with respect to the user's virtual body, and the effects of those actions in the cyberspace would be felt in terms of their effects on the input routed to the user's brain. Meanwhile, the cyberspace system would also have to monitor the user's physical I/O and either handle it directly or interrupt the user's cyberspace due to an inability to decide how to handle the input. For example, suppose that while our user is enjoying an extended adventure into cyberspace, the cyberspace system receives input from the user's nose which indicates the probable presence of a nearby fire. The system could either manipulate the user's physical body such that the situation is resolved (e.g., the user's body could be made to pick up a fire extinguisher and activate it, or to place a call to the fire department, etc.), or interrupt the cyberspace experience so that the user could take any actions that might be deemed appropriate. Given the existence of current scientific techniques for physically picking up *atoms* and moving them, it may not be unreasonable to expect the ability to interpose cyberspace/reality gateways between the brain and its I/O devices to be realized within perhaps 20 years. If this technique does indeed become feasible, then the problem of kinesthetic dissonance will become subject to total elimination. Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu