[huml-comment] RE: FW: [www-vrml] Fw: Being There - The new FREE bookon Presenc e

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

If nothing else, it and the success of the SIMS franchise 
validate what the VRMLers have been trying to achieve for 
some time.  And it says there finally may be money in it.

When HTML came along, the veterans of hypertext recognized 
the design immediately.  They also mostly didn't like it 
because they knew where it would run out of steam technically. 
A smaller set also knew it world go like a grassfire because 

1.  Most important:  the spice would flow in vast quantities; 
that is, more information at lower cost to more people.

2.  It would satisfy the human urge to create actions in a medium 
mostly reserved to priests (programmers) before that.

So a dumbed down version of old experimental technology changed 
everything everyone in the CS industry was focused on as well as 
drawing in the media, mom and pop and the neighbors.

Immersive, presence based interfaces may be poised to do that, 
but today, it is still mostly experiments or very expensive 
single focus setups.   The Gibsonian experience promised by 
Pesce et al from VRML has yet to occur because the dumbed down 
technology has yet to emerge and the desire to create actionable 
experience is sated for the moment.

If initiatives like HumanML are to be of any help here, the 
products must be stripped down to basic, easy to apply sets 
that act as a multiplier on the experience of presence in 
the virtual world they augment.  I believe we have ferreted 
out the basic properties of human communication in context 
that must be supported, but no one has stepped forward with 
the resources to do the experiments, and the academic world 
is spread from here to hell in their different but converging 
approaches.  Like HTML, at some point, someone trying to 
solve a given problem will take the pieces and do the chopshop 
voodoo.

len

From: Sandy Ressler [mailto:sressler@nist.gov]

And speaking of "there" there is a new multiuser world project at  
www.there.com
it's got lots of money and notables behind it...not sure what's new if  
anything, in it though...Sandy